The blue light of the monitors didn't just illuminate the office; it seemed to leach the color out of the room until Delaney herself was a grayscale ghost.
She sat back in her ergonomic chair, her eyes scanning a document Sarah had pulled from a dusty archive in Lansing. It was a birth certificate—or rather, the lack of one. The dates didn't align. The blood types on the old clinical records from the Detroit garage days were a mathematical impossibility.
A cold, sharp smile touched Delaney's lips. This was the "New Light" the Prophet had always talked about—the kind of truth that didn't just reveal, but destroyed.
The "Gravel to Glitter" narrative was too simple. The "Sociopath" angle was good, but this? This was the "Correction." She would tell the world that the "sacred bond" the Fighter flaunted—the sister he protected, the "we against the world" myth—was just another performance. A fraud. If they weren't biological siblings, then his protectiveness wasn't "manly devotion"; it was a fixation. It was a lie built to keep the "freak" narrative alive.
She remembered her own mother's words: "Biological attachment is a sin of the ego." Her mother had been willing to let Delaney's father die because the "Family" was more important than the man. Now, Delaney would do the same to him. She would strip away his family tree and leave him standing in the dirt, a boy with no origin story.
She leaned into the microphone of her headset, dialing Marcus.
She hung up before he could argue.
She looked at the photo of the Fighter and Elena together at the gallery. They looked so solid. So real. It made her stomach churn. It reminded her of the way her father used to hold her hand before the "Prophet" told him it was a sign of weakness.
By exposing the "lie" of their biology, she was finally "correcting" the world. She was proving that no one gets to have a real bond. No one gets to be "chosen" by blood.
Victor walked past the office door, his small shadow flickering against the glass. Delaney didn't even turn her head. She didn't see a nephew, or a son, or a human being. She only saw another biological anomaly—a "zero" that didn't fit into the machine.
She turned back to the screen and hit the keys with a frantic, industrial speed. Clack. Clack. Clack. The "Something Bigger" was screaming now, a high-pitched siren of ego and trauma. She was going to burn the Fighter's house down, and when the smoke cleared, she would show the world that there were no siblings in the ruins—only two strangers who had lied to survive.