Chapter 2 The Funeral Pyre

# Chapter 2: The Funeral Pyre

Whitney awoke to the rhythmic beeping of medical equipment, stark white walls closing in around her. A throbbing pain radiated from her temple where she'd smashed the wine bottle. Her fingers explored the careful stitches someone had meticulously placed along her hairline.

"The doctor says your memory might be affected," came Robin Mills' voice, uncharacteristically gentle as he leaned forward in his chair beside her bed. His handcuffs were gone, replaced by a platinum watch that caught the fluorescent light. "Do you remember anything about last night?"

Whitney blinked slowly, her mind racing behind a carefully constructed mask of confusion. "I... where am I?"

"A specialized facility for trauma recovery," Robin answered, his fingers brushing against hers with calculated tenderness. "You had an accident."

Whitney allowed her eyes to drift around the room—hospital-grade equipment, security cameras in every corner, and windows that appeared to be reinforced. This was no ordinary medical facility. Her gaze fell on the small tablet Robin had left on the side table, its screen displaying a GPS map with a blinking dot in the middle of the ocean.

"Robin," she whispered, infusing her voice with vulnerable uncertainty, "I'm scared. I don't remember anything."

His expression softened further, exactly as she'd intended. "I'll protect you. The others wanted to handle this... differently. But I convinced them you needed care, not interrogation."

The door opened, and a white-coated doctor entered with a clipboard. "How's our patient doing? Memory still foggy?"

Whitney nodded weakly, watching Robin's protective stance with calculated interest. The man was a billionaire CEO known for crushing competitors without remorse, yet here he was, playing nursemaid to a woman who had allegedly drugged him.

"I'll need to run some more tests," the doctor said, pulling out a syringe filled with pale blue liquid. "This should help stimulate memory recovery."

Robin's phone buzzed. He glanced at it with irritation before standing. "I need to take this. Business emergency. I'll be right outside."

The moment the door closed behind him, the doctor's demeanor changed. He approached with clinical efficiency, tapping the syringe to remove air bubbles.

"This won't hurt," he said, though his tone suggested the opposite. "Mr. Mills has invested considerably in your... rehabilitation."

Whitney's system interface flickered to life in her peripheral vision:

【Warning: Detected substance matches compound XR-27, fatal in 94.3% of human subjects】

As the needle approached her arm, Whitney's hand shot up with unexpected speed, grabbing the doctor's wrist and twisting it until the syringe changed direction. With a decisive thrust, she plunged the needle into his eye.

"You're right," she whispered as he collapsed with a muffled scream. "It didn't hurt me at all."

She quickly stripped the man of his lab coat and access card, checking the hallway before slipping out. The facility's layout became clearer as she moved—this was no hospital, but a retrofitted luxury yacht, likely heading toward Robin's private island where he could contain her indefinitely.

Whitney found a security room three doors down, unattended save for banks of monitors. What she saw made her freeze: five separate chambers, each containing a woman who looked exactly like her. The clones were in various states—one sedated, another pacing frantically, a third staring directly at the camera as if sensing Whitney's gaze through the digital barrier.

Her phone vibrated in the pocket of the stolen lab coat. A notification from Justin Horton's public livestream popped up on screen. Curious, she tapped it.

Justin's perfect face filled the screen, his eyes rimmed with red as if he'd been crying—or expertly applied emotion-enhancing drops before filming.

"To my beloved fans," he began, his voice carrying the practiced tremor of manufactured vulnerability. "I've found the one. After all these years of searching, I've finally found someone who completes me."

Whitney almost laughed at the absurdity—until she heard the background noise. Behind Justin's emotional confession came the unmistakable sounds of violence: a dull thud, followed by a gurgling cry.

"Tell me where she is!" Ted Alvarez's voice growled off-camera.

Justin continued smiling for his audience, positioning himself to block whatever was happening behind him. "She's everything I've ever wanted. My heart, my soul, my—"

Another scream punctuated his declaration of love.

Whitney silenced the video, a chill running down her spine. Ted wasn't just looking for her—he was torturing people to find her.

A strange vibration against her ankle made her jump. Bending down, she discovered a tiny device embedded in her shoe heel, blinking with a steady red light. Her phone chimed with an incoming text from an unknown number:

【姐姐, your heart rate just increased to 110 BPM. Are you excited? Or afraid? Either way, I feel it too.】

Albert. Somehow he had implanted a biometric tracker on her, monitoring her vital signs in real time.

Whitney's exploration brought her to what appeared to be a medical bay. Inside, a doctor—a real one, judging by his confident movements—prepared a syringe of iridescent liquid labeled "Mnemosyne Protocol."

"Ah, there you are," he said without looking up. "Mr. Mills was concerned about your condition. This memory restoration formula should bring everything back."

Whitney approached slowly, noting the security camera in the corner. "And what exactly will I remember?"

The doctor finally looked at her, his expression clinical but with underlying tension. "Everything you've been trying to forget. Your... accidents. Your special relationship with our benefactors."

Whitney grabbed a scalpel from a nearby tray, holding it behind her back. "And this formula—it's safe?"

"Perfectly," he lied, his pulse visibly jumping in his neck. "Though some patients experience... resistance to certain memories. The brain protects itself, you see."

In one fluid motion, Whitney drove the scalpel into the doctor's eye socket. "So does the body," she hissed, pushing the needle of his own syringe into his carotid artery as he screamed. "This formula—will it kill me?"

"Y-yes," he gasped, clutching at his bleeding face. "It destroys the frontal lobe before shutting down the respiratory system. You weren't meant to survive this session."

Whitney wiped the scalpel on the man's white coat. "At least you're honest in death."

She turned to leave when the wall-mounted monitor flickered to life, splitting into five separate feeds. Each showed an identical room containing a Whitney—the clones she'd seen earlier. But now the camera zoomed in, revealing subtle differences: one had a scar on her neck, another a tattoo on her wrist, a third with heterochromia.

The system chimed in her head:

【Anomaly detected: Genetic duplicates located. Warning: Multiple identity signatures present.】

As Whitney stared at her doppelgängers, she felt a strange itching sensation behind her ear. Reaching up, she felt raised skin—a pattern. Finding a reflective surface, she angled her head to see what was there: a barcode, with the designation "No.6" underneath.

Whitney wasn't the original. She wasn't even the only copy.

She was just another version in someone's twisted collection.