The Midnight Address
Vera Kane - POV
The rain tastes like copper and secrets as I stand outside 1247 Post Alley at 11:58 PM, staring at a door that shouldn't exist. The address from Raven's note led me through Pike Place Market's maze of closed vendors and shuttered stalls, down a narrow alley that Google Maps insists is a dead end. But here's the door, unmarked except for numbers so faded they might be shadows, tucked between a boarded-up fish shop and what looks like a century of accumulated grime.
My hands shake as I check the napkin again. Same address. Same time.
The key from my jacket pocket slides into the lock like it was made for it.
The door opens onto a staircase that descends into clinical white light. Each step down feels like sinking deeper into someone else's nightmare, but my feet know these stairs. My body moves with unconscious familiarity while my mind screams that I've never been here before in my life.
The basement smells like antiseptic and fear.
"Phoenix." The woman behind the reception desk doesn't look up from her computer. She's Asian, maybe forty, with the kind of steady hands that suggest medical training and the kind of tired eyes that suggest she's seen too much. "You're early tonight."
Phoenix. Not Vera. Not even Raven.
"I'm sorry, I think you have me confused with—"
"Room Three is ready." She slides a clipboard across the counter without meeting my eyes. "Dr. Chen will be with you shortly."
The clipboard holds medical forms with my signature at the bottom. My signature, in handwriting I don't recognize, authorizing procedures I've never heard of. Memory fragmentation therapy. Personality integration protocols. Neural pathway reconstruction.
The signature is dated three days ago.
"I didn't sign this." My voice comes out as a whisper.
Now she looks at me, and her expression shifts from professional detachment to something that might be concern. "Phoenix, are you having memory issues again? We discussed this. The therapy can cause temporary disorientation."
"My name is Vera Kane."
"Is it?" She pulls a thick file from beneath the counter, and my photograph stares up at me from the cover. But it's not me, not really. The woman in the photo looks confident, dangerous. Her eyes hold secrets I've never learned and skills I've never developed. "According to your records, you've been coming here for two years. Every Tuesday and Friday at midnight."
Two years. The same amount of time I've been in integration therapy with Dr. Voss.
My legs give out, and I sink into one of the waiting room chairs. The leather is warm, worn smooth by bodies that have sat here before me. How many times have I sat in this exact spot, agreeing to procedures I can't remember?
"Dr. Chen will explain everything." The receptionist's voice carries a gentleness now, the way people speak to trauma victims. "He always does."
Room Three is smaller than Dr. Voss's office but twice as intimate. The examination table dominates the space, covered in paper that crinkles like fear when I accidentally brush against it. Medical equipment lines the walls—some I recognize, others that look like they belong in a science fiction film rather than a clinic.
Dr. Chen enters without knocking. He's younger than I expected, maybe fifty, with surgeon's hands and the kind of face that suggests he's comfortable with other people's pain. When he sees me, he stops.
"You're not supposed to remember this place."
"I don't." The words tumble out before I can stop them. "I found the address in a note. From Raven. From myself. I don't understand what's happening to me."
He sets down his tablet and studies me with the intensity of someone trying to solve a puzzle. "When did the memory bleeds start?"
"The what?"
"Phoenix's memories surfacing in Vera's consciousness. We've been monitoring the integration, but this is ahead of schedule." He pulls up what looks like brain scans on his tablet, colorful images that mean nothing to me but everything to him. "The barriers are breaking down faster than anticipated."
"What barriers?"
Dr. Chen's laugh holds no humor. "The ones keeping you sane. Sir down, Phoenix. We have a lot to discuss."
I don't sit. I can't. My body feels like it belongs to someone else, and that someone else is fighting to surface. "My name is Vera."
"Vera is a construction. A personality overlay designed to suppress Phoenix's memories while maintaining motor function and basic cognitive ability." He speaks like he's explaining a medical procedure, clinical and detached. "Dr. Voss contracted us to create the perfect split—two personalities sharing one body, neither able to fully integrate with the other."
The room tilts. I grab the examination table to keep from falling.
"That's impossible."
"Is it? How else do you explain the combat skills you don't remember learning? The languages you speak but never studied? The scars on your body from training you never received?"
My hand moves automatically to my shoulder, where a thin white line marks skin that should be unmarked. I've always assumed it was from childhood, some accident I'd forgotten. But as Dr. Chen speaks, I can almost remember the blade that made it. Almost remember the woman who taught me to ignore the pain.
Almost remember being someone else entirely.
"Dr. Voss said I had dissociative identity disorder. From trauma. From my crisis negotiation work."
"Dr. Voss says many things." Dr. Chen opens a cabinet and removes a vial filled with dark liquid. Blood. My blood, according to the label. "She pays us very well to maintain the conditioning, but she doesn't pay us to lie to ourselves about what we're doing."
He hands me the vial, and something about the weight of it in my palm feels familiar. Like I've held it before.
"What is this?"
"Insurance. Phoenix insisted we keep samples, in case the integration ever went wrong." His eyes meet mine, and for the first time, I see something that might be regret. "She said when the time came, I'd know what to do with it."
Taped to the bottom of the vial is a note in my own handwriting: For when you remember who you really are.
"Phoenix knew this would happen?"
"Phoenix has been planning her return since the day Dr. Voss buried her." Dr. Chen opens another cabinet, this one filled with photographs. "She left these for you. For when Vera was ready to remember."
The first photograph stops my breath. It's me—but not me. I'm wearing tactical gear, crouched beside a man whose face I've seen in dreams I thought were fantasies. His hands are on my waist, pulling me close, and I'm looking at him like he's the center of my universe.
Like I love him.
Like I've always loved him.
"Who is he?"
"Ask Phoenix. She's the one with the memories." Dr. Chen gathers the photographs, slides them into an envelope with my name on it. "But be careful, Vera. The more you remember, the more dangerous you become. To yourself and to everyone around you."
I take the envelope with trembling fingers. Through the clinic's single window, I catch a glimpse of movement in the alley. Someone watching. Waiting.
"Dr. Chen, I think someone followed me here."
But when I turn around, he's already gone. The clinic feels different now, emptier. Like a stage after the performance has ended.
The surveillance photos in the envelope show me leaving this clinic dozens of times over the past two years. In every image, I move with confidence I don't recognize, purpose I don't understand. And in the background of several photos, always at a distance but unmistakably present, is the same figure.
Watching. Protecting. Hunting.
I don't know which.