My Sister Drowned Eight Years Ago — Then She Looked Down At Me From A Lighthouse And Told Me I Should Have Stayed In My Wheelchair
I threw a rock at a flashlight and prayed it would be enough to save both our lives. It was the only weapon I had.
The lens shattered, and the cave went black instantly.
«Run!» I screamed, not even sure which direction was safe anymore.
A gunshot ripped through the dark. I felt the bullet chip stone right next to my ear, close enough that my whole body went cold. Somewhere behind us, our dog didn’t hesitate — he threw himself at the man who’d just tried to kill me.
Alejandro grabbed my wrist and pulled me forward before I could process any of it. We stumbled over rusted tracks in the pitch black, soaked shoes sliding on wet gravel.
Then I heard it. A metallic thud. A pained whine.
«Brutus!» I gasped, trying to turn back for him.
«He bought us time, Nia. Keep moving.» Alejandro’s grip only got tighter.
We climbed until concrete stairs replaced the rails, chasing a flicker of light above us. We came out through a broken trapdoor into the base of an old lighthouse, storm lightning flashing through a shattered lantern room high overhead.
That’s when the pain hit.
It started low in my back, a burning heat unlike anything I’d felt before, radiating out from a spot I knew all too well — the exact place where I’d had surgery years ago. The silver watch in my hand was pulsing faster now, like it knew something I didn’t.
17 minutes remaining.
«We need a surgeon. Or a bomb squad. Maybe both,» Alejandro said, scanning the shadows with his gun raised.
«It’s not a bomb,» I told him, fighting to breathe through the pain spreading into my hips. «It’s designed to wipe my entire nervous system. He didn’t just hide something inside me. He made sure nobody could ever get it back out.»
Alejandro knelt behind me, fingers brushing along an old scar at the base of my spine. Static snapped against his skin the second he touched it.
«There’s a port here,» he said quietly. «Someone built an override into you.»
Before either of us could say another word, the heavy door at the bottom of the lighthouse slammed shut. The bolt locked from the outside.
I looked up.
Someone was standing on the iron catwalk above us, watching. It wasn’t the man who’d been chasing us.
They pulled off a wet mask, and dark hair fell across their shoulders — a face I hadn’t seen in eight years. A face I had grieved for. A face I had cried myself to sleep over more nights than I could count.
They pulled off a wet mask, and dark hair fell across their shoulders — a face I hadn’t seen in eight years. A face I had grieved for. A face I had cried myself to sleep over more nights than I could count.
«Elena?»
My own sister looked down at me like I was a stranger.
«You should have stayed in the wheelchair, Nia,» she said, her voice bouncing off the old iron walls. «It was safer for you there.»
«You’re alive,» I managed to say, tears cutting through the dirt on my face. «We thought the sea took you. We thought you drowned.»
«I didn’t drown,» she said flatly. «I built all of this. The man who did this to you? He wasn’t the one in charge. He worked for me.»
Alejandro raised his gun toward the catwalk. «Drop whatever’s in your hand, Elena, or —»
«Go ahead and shoot,» she cut him off, completely unbothered. «The countdown in my sister’s spine is tied to my heartbeat. If mine stops, hers ends too. Fifteen minutes, and everything in her head disappears for good.»
My legs buckled. Heat shot down through them, and my left foot went numb, hitting the ground like it belonged to someone else.
«Why?» I sobbed, barely able to stay upright. «Why would you do this to me?»
«Because you were the one place nobody would ever think to look,» she said, starting down the spiral stairs toward me. «You were perfect for this. And now I need what’s owed to me.»
She pressed a small switch in her hand.
The floor under Alejandro exploded outward, concrete giving way beneath him in an instant. He was gone, swallowed into blackness before I could even scream his name properly.
10 minutes remaining.
Elena kept walking toward me, calm, holding something cold and surgical in her hand.
«Don’t worry,» she whispered, kneeling beside me like she actually cared. «You won’t feel a thing.»
Then a bloodied hand shot out from the dark behind her and grabbed her ankle so hard she stumbled.
It wasn’t Alejandro.
The man who’d shot at us in the cave pulled himself up out of the shadows, barely standing, blood covering half his face — and drove a needle straight into my sister’s neck before she could react.
I still don’t know, to this day, whether that needle saved my life or ended what was left of my sister’s.