Three days passed before Allison found the courage to pursue the name Marchetti had given her. She spent those days in a state of controlled paranoia, cataloging every object in her apartment each morning and checking it against memory each evening. Nothing else had gone missing. No further intrusions. She began to wonder if she had imagined the whole thing—the moved lamp, the missing notepad—until she remembered the quality of the air in her apartment that night. Disturbed. Still settling.
Elias Voss. The name appeared in the Department of Probation and Paroles database as a parolee under minimal supervision. His original conviction was for armed robbery fifteen years earlier, with a sentence of twenty to life. He had been paroled after serving twelve, with glowing recommendations from Blackridge's classification committee. His parole officer had noted "exemplary compliance" in every quarterly report since his release.
Allison pulled his address from the file. He lived in Lowry Heights, a neighborhood of aging apartment complexes and boarded storefronts on Ashland's south side, where parolees were warehoused in buildings that were themselves on probation against demolition. She decided to visit without announcing herself. A surprise inspection, she could claim, if anyone questioned it.
The building at 1420 Mercer Street was four stories of stained brick and rusted fire escapes. The lobby smelled of mildew and cooked onions. The elevator was out of service, so Allison climbed the stairs to the third floor, her footsteps echoing in the concrete stairwell. Apartment 3B was at the end of a dim corridor. She knocked and waited.
No answer.
She knocked again, harder. "Mr. Voss? My name is Allison Cole. I'm with the Department of Probation and Paroles. I'd like to ask you a few questions."
A long pause. Then, the sound of a deadbolt turning, followed by a chain sliding free. The door opened a few inches, revealing a slice of a face—hollow cheeks, deep-set eyes, skin the color of old putty.
"What do you want?" The voice was flat, without curiosity or hostility. Just sound shaped into words.
"May I come in? It's about your time at Blackridge. Specifically, a program you participated in there."
The door opened wider, and Allison stepped inside. The apartment was sparsely furnished—a sagging couch, a coffee table with a single glass of water on it, a television that was turned off. The curtains were drawn despite the afternoon sun. The air was still and stale, as if the windows had never been opened.
Elias Voss sat on the couch without inviting her to do the same. He was thin in a way that went beyond physical wasting. His movements were slow and precise, like a machine running on low battery. He stared at a point on the wall just past her shoulder.
"You were in the Neuro-Rehabilitative Initiative at Blackridge," Allison said, taking a seat across from him. "I'm trying to understand more about that program. What it involved. How it affected the participants."
Voss's eyes shifted slowly toward her face. "It helped me."
"Helped you how?"
"I used to be angry. All the time. Even when I slept, I dreamed about hurting people. Now I don't." He said this with no pride or relief, as if describing a change in the weather.
"What did the treatment consist of?"
"Don't remember much. They took me to the medical wing. Gave me injections. There were tests. Lights and sounds. Sometimes I slept for a long time afterward."
"Injections of what?"
"They didn't say. But it was medicine. To fix what was wrong in my brain." He touched his temple with two fingers. "Dr. Vane said it was going to help me. Help all of us."
Allison felt a chill that had nothing to do with the apartment's stale air. "Dr. Aldric Vane? From OmniCorr Health?"
"Yeah. He was there sometimes. Talked to us about second chances. About how society wastes too many lives on punishment when it could be fixing people instead." Voss paused. "I believed him."
"But something went wrong, didn't it? With the treatment?"
Voss was silent for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice was barely above a whisper. "After a while, I stopped dreaming altogether. Not just the bad dreams. All of them. I stopped wanting things. Stopped caring about food, or music, or getting out. The anger was gone, but so was everything else."
He looked at her then, and for the first time, Allison saw something flicker in his eyes—a ghost of the man he had been before OmniCorr had taken him apart and put him back together.
"They said the side effects would fade. They didn't. When they paroled me, they gave me a list of things to do. I do them. I eat when the list says to eat. I sleep when it says to sleep. But I don't feel hungry or tired anymore. I don't feel anything."
Allison took notes with a hand that trembled slightly. "Do you remember other inmates who went through the same program? Anyone who had worse reactions?"
"Wren," Voss said. "Marcus Wren. He was in my cohort. The third phase hit him harder than the rest of us. He started having seizures. The nurses would sedate him, and he'd be out for days. Last time I saw him, he didn't recognize me. Just stared at the wall like he was already gone."
"When was this?"
"Two months before I got paroled. They moved him to Ward H full-time after that. I heard he died. Heart attack, they said." Voss's voice broke, just slightly, on the last word. It was the most emotion he had shown since she arrived.
Allison closed her notebook. "Mr. Voss, I want to help you. There may be others who were harmed by this program, and the people responsible should be held accountable. Would you be willing to provide a formal statement about your experience?"
Voss shook his head, a slow, mechanical motion. "I can't. They said if I talked about the program, my parole could be revoked. Said the treatment was experimental and I signed something that said I wouldn't discuss it. I just want to be left alone."
"But you're not alone, are you? You're barely living."
"I'm not hurting anyone. That's what they wanted. That's what the program did." He stood up, signaling the interview was over. "You should leave now, Ms. Cole. And you should stop asking questions. People who ask questions about OmniCorr... bad things happen to them."
Allison left the apartment with a heaviness in her chest that bordered on physical pain. She sat in her car in the parking lot for ten minutes, watching the blank windows of the building, thinking about Elias Voss sitting alone in his dim apartment, following a list of instructions, waiting for feelings that would never return.
She didn't go back to the office. Instead, she drove across town to St. Dymphna's Medical Center, where she had a contact—a nurse named Clara Okonkwo who had once testified in a probation hearing about a client's mental health history. Clara was a pragmatic woman with kind eyes and the exhaustion of someone who had worked too many double shifts.
"I need information about a company called OmniCorr Health," Allison said when Clara met her in the hospital cafeteria. "Specifically, any connection they might have to neurological research or pharmaceuticals."
Clara stirred her coffee thoughtfully. "OmniCorr. They've been in the news. Mostly trade journals, nothing the public would read. They're doing something with neural plasticity—rewiring the brain to treat addiction, violent impulses, that sort of thing. The science is legitimate, or at least it was a few years ago. But I've heard rumors."
"What kind of rumors?"
"That they moved too fast. That the animal trials were rushed and the human trials were even worse. A colleague of mine at Ashland General said they had a patient come in last year—former inmate, early forties—who had complete atrophy in his prefrontal cortex. Looked like advanced dementia, but the onset was sudden. He died three weeks later. The family wouldn't authorize an autopsy."
Allison felt the pieces beginning to align in her mind, forming a picture she didn't want to see. "Would your colleague talk to me?"
"Off the record, maybe. On the record? Absolutely not. Everyone's scared. OmniCorr has contracts worth hundreds of millions with the state. They've got connections everywhere—the governor's office, the judiciary, even the federal oversight boards. You don't go up against that kind of power without getting crushed."
That evening, Allison sat at her desk long after her coworkers had left. She composed a carefully worded email to the Ashland Office of the Inspector General, outlining her concerns about the Neuro-Rehabilitative Initiative and requesting an investigation. She attached the photographs of Wren's behavioral reports and Voss's statements. Before sending, she saved a draft and stared at the screen for half an hour.
At 9:47 PM, she hit send.
At 10:15 PM, her phone buzzed with a text from an unknown number: Delete the draft. Don't send the email. This is your only warning.
Allison's blood went cold. She looked around the empty office, suddenly aware of how isolated she was. The building was silent. The parking lot outside was nearly empty. She grabbed her laptop and her bag and walked quickly to her car, scanning the shadows for anyone who might be watching.
She drove home with her doors locked, taking a circuitous route through residential streets. When she reached her apartment, she found the door slightly ajar. The frame was splintered where the lock had been forced.
Inside, her apartment had been systematically dismantled. Drawers pulled out, books knocked from shelves, couch cushions slashed. But it wasn't random vandalism—it was targeted. Her laptop was gone from her desk. The filing cabinet where she kept work documents had been pried open and emptied.
And the legal reference book on her shelf—the one with the hollowed-out spine—was missing.
Allison stood in the wreckage of her home and understood, with terrifying clarity, that she was no longer an investigator. She was prey. And whoever was hunting her had just made their intentions brutally clear.
She pulled out her phone and dialed the only person she could think of who might help—a retired journalist named Saul Edelman who had once written an exposé on private prison contracts and had been forced into early retirement as a result. He had told her once, at a conference, that if she ever found herself on the wrong side of powerful people, she should call him.
The phone rang four times. Then a voice, gruff and cautious: "Who is this?"
"Saul, it's Allison Cole. From the probation department. You told me to call if I ever got in trouble. I'm in trouble."
There was a pause. Then: "Tell me everything."
Allison looked at the ruins of her apartment, thought about Marcus Wren dead in his cell, about Elias Voss sitting alone in his dark apartment, about all the invisible scars that the law refused to see. She took a deep breath and began to speak.
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