The Sister They Called Unstable
Chapter 04 - The Sister They Called Unstable
Laura drove Rachel to the emergency clinic.
Nathan objected, but several guests had entered the upstairs hall after hearing raised voices. He could not refuse without explaining the injury.
He kissed Rachel’s forehead before she left.
To anyone watching, he looked concerned.
Into her ear, he whispered, “Do not lie about me.”
At the clinic, a physician documented a partial-thickness contact burn across Rachel’s fingers and the side of her hand. The injury did not require surgery, but it required treatment, dressings, and follow-up.
The physician asked how it happened.
Rachel looked at Laura.
Laura said nothing.
“I was holding a pan,” Rachel answered.
The incomplete truth felt like a second injury.
After the physician left, Laura closed the door.
“That is how they survive,” she said. “They make you tell the smallest version first.”
Rachel stared at the white bandage.
“You reactivated the camera.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Graham built a dormant power cell into the wall. Unit 7 wakes when the emergency circuit detects a rapid temperature change and human distress.”
“The blue light.”
“Confirms upload.”
Rachel remembered Nathan forcing her hand toward the pan.
“Did it record everything?”
“If the archive still exists.”
Laura explained that Graham maintained a hidden server separate from Sterling’s network. After his death, Nathan and Vivienne searched the workshop but failed to locate it.
Graham had divided access into two parts.
Laura possessed the archive address.
Rachel possessed the brass hardware key.
“Why me?”
“Because he trusted you more than he trusted us.”
Laura’s voice held pain, not jealousy.
Two years earlier, she discovered irregularities in Sterling’s customer-data division. Private camera feeds from luxury homes were being copied into an unauthorized analytics database.
Nathan claimed Laura was paranoid.
Vivienne arranged a psychiatric evaluation.
The company board accepted medical reports stating Laura experienced delusions related to surveillance.
She was removed as chief technology officer and placed under a temporary guardianship controlled by Vivienne.
“I wasn’t sick,” Laura said. “I was exhausted, frightened, and drugged with medication I did not need.”
Rachel felt cold.
“Graham believed you?”
“Too late.”
Graham secretly helped Laura end the guardianship. He began investigating Nathan and Vivienne, but he died before presenting the evidence.
The official cause was a stroke.
Laura did not believe it.
She took out her phone and displayed a photograph from the night Graham died.
Blue Unit 7 sat beneath his workshop desk.
Its light was glowing.
“If we open the archive,” Laura said, “we may find your kitchen video.”
“And your evidence.”
“And the last hours of my father’s life.”
Rachel looked at her bandaged hand.
For years, Nathan had taught her that survival meant preventing the next scene.
May you like
The blue light offered something different.
A record.
