The room seemed to shrink around him.
Not from the size, but from the weight. The screen glowed with quiet menace, casting shadows across the cracked tile floor, illuminating dust that moved like ash in the air.
Alon stared at the words.
NORA BEN-MEIR – Status: Dormant. Awaiting Directive.
Beside it, a coded string pulsed in intervals. Authorization tags. Flags. Digital fingerprints that didn’t belong to any department they recognized. Symbols that belonged to a deeper branch of command. A branch that didn’t write reports. It wrote futures.
Leah’s voice was low.
“They were going to activate her the moment you were reassigned. A clean cycle. Emotional tether. Operative pair. No memory of the loop. No trace of past directives.”
“Like she never existed,” Alon said, his voice hollow.
“No, like she always existed,” Leah corrected. “Just differently.”
He stepped back from the terminal. The air felt colder now.
“How long?”
Leah shrugged, eyes heavy. “Six months, maybe more. They’ve been adjusting her, subtly. Surveillance blind spots. Emotional triggers. Digital fingerprints scrubbed from old mission logs. It’s soft erasure. Layered. She wouldn’t feel it. Not until it was done.”
Alon felt his jaw tighten. The taste of steel in his mouth. Rage held in check only by clarity.
“They turned her into a contingency.”
“They turned us all into contingencies,” Leah said.
Later, in the station’s shadows, they separated.
Leah handed him a small device, flat, black, shaped like a coin.
“A decoder,” she said. “For the rest of the archive. I’m going to Berlin. There’s someone still on the inside. Someone who remembers the origin of Shemesh. But you, ”
“I have to get to her.”
She nodded.
“Before they make her forget who she is.”
Alon took the next outbound train, no destination listed on the ticket. Just a code string burned into the back of the paper.
He traveled through a blur of countries and hours, but none of it stayed with him.
Only the weight of what waited.
When he arrived back in London, the city felt unfamiliar. The buildings too clean. The noise too scripted. A simulation of memory.
The kind they’d tried to write into Nora.
She wasn’t in the flat.
That wasn’t unexpected.
But what waited on the table was.
A folded page. Crisp. Centered.
Alon
If I disappear, don’t follow.
Find the boy in Haifa.
He remembers what they took.
And he never forgets faces.
, N
He read it twice.
Then turned the page over.
A photo. Old. Blurry.
A child in a white t-shirt, standing outside a sand-colored house on Mount Carmel. The boy’s eyes were dark, too serious for his age.
Alon knew those eyes.
He had seen them once, years ago.
In a compound raid.
A hostage who hadn’t spoken a word.
A child who had disappeared before the reports were filed.
Someone Mossad had marked as unrecoverable.
But someone who had clearly survived.
And now Nora was telling him to find him.
That night, Alon stood at the edge of the Thames again.
But he wasn’t looking at the water.
He was staring at his own reflection in the glass of a darkened train station window.
And wondering,
How many parts of himself had already been rewritten?