A Body Out of Time

The county morgue smelled of disinfectant and stale air, a place where time felt suspended, the past preserved in cold storage. Jessica and Leanna followed the medical examiner, Dr. Harold Andersson, through the dimly lit hall, their footsteps echoing against tile.

“Sheriff’s office already took their notes, but I don’t mind giving you a look.” Dr. Andersson glanced at them over the rim of his glasses, his tone carrying the gruff exhaustion of a man who had seen too many corpses and too few answers. “Not much to tell, though. Body’s been in the ground a long time.”

Leanna exchanged a look with Jessica. Not as long as it should have been.

The examination room was colder than the hall, the chill seeping through Jessica’s jacket as she stepped closer to the slab where Jason Carter’s body lay. The sheet covering him was crisp, clinical, the only dignity afforded to the dead. Andersson pulled it back with the kind of detachment that came from decades of experience, but even he hesitated for a fraction of a second.

Jason looked… too well preserved.

Jessica felt it immediately. The body didn’t match the timeline. The forensic photos from the crime scene had suggested standard decomposition, but now, standing over him, she could see it wasn’t right. No bloating. No severe decay. No skeletal exposure.

Andersson must have read the shift in her expression. He nodded grimly. “You see it too.”

Leanna folded her arms. “How?”

Andersson sighed, pushing his glasses up. “I can’t say for sure. But if I had to guess, I’d say this body was frozen for a long time before it was put in the ground.”

Jessica inhaled slowly. Frozen. Stored. Kept.

Leanna’s jaw tightened, her mind clearly working through the implications. “You’re saying someone had this body in a freezer for years and only recently decided to get rid of it?”

Andersson shrugged. “It wouldn’t be the first time someone used cold storage to throw off a time of death. But this isn’t just good preservation, it’s near-perfect. Almost like it was meant to be found intact.”

Jessica stared at Jason’s face, feeling the weight of a memory she didn’t have. The same face she used to see in the mirror, before she became someone else.

Andersson moved to the side table and picked up a plastic evidence bag. “Sheriff sent this over. Everything the kid had on him.” He set the bag down, and Leanna’s breath hitched.

Inside were the clothes Jason had been wearing the night of the party.

Jessica and Leanna exchanged a glance. It was impossible. The timeline didn’t fit. Jason had disappeared that night. They had assumed he had been taken, experimented on. But if his body had been frozen wearing those exact clothes…

Had he ever left that night at all?

Leanna ran a hand over her face. “This doesn’t make sense.”

“It gets stranger,” Andersson said. He picked up a file and handed it over. “Forensics ran a full genetic analysis. There were… irregularities.”

Jessica flipped through the pages. Then she stopped. Her stomach turned to ice.

Leanna had gone still beside her. “Jesus.”

The chromosome markers. The sequencing patterns. They were nearly identical to the ones that had shown up in Jessica’s medical tests after the Penn Relays.

Jessica felt her throat go dry. “These are engineered.”

Andersson frowned. “You know what they mean?”

Jessica met Leanna’s gaze. Yeah, they knew what they meant. The same genetic anomalies that made Jessica what she was had shown up in Jason. But Jason had been a football player, a normal college kid, hadn’t he?

Leanna exhaled sharply, snapping the file shut. “Where’s the sheriff?”

“Upstairs,” Andersson said. “You planning to ask questions?”

Jessica adjusted her jacket. “Something like that.”

Because now, they had more than just a body. They had proof something had been done to Jason long before that night. And someone had waited ten years to put him back where they could find him.

The past wasn’t done with them yet.