Chapter 63: Botch
Nikhil had known that they'd come for him sooner or later. He was never in Paragon's prison for long - a few weeks, maybe a month or two at most - before the slate of his mind was wiped clean and painted once more with another pretend life that he had no choice but to live out.
He didn't fully trust his sense of time in this dark, quiet cell, where each day had a tendency to bleed into the next. But he was fairly certain that he was already pushing six weeks or so with this latest visit. It was only a matter of time before he was saddled with another stitch, another set of memories, another identity to try to sort out from the rest.
But this time, he had hope that things might be different. 14 had been teaching him to resist the stitch, to pick a single strong memory - something real - and focus solely on that thought until the procedure was over. "The trace," she'd called it - because he could use that memory to trace a path back to what was real.