Chapter 28 - The Architect in the Wall
Ethan looked up. The revolver in his hand felt suddenly impossibly heavy, its weight dragging his arm toward the concrete floor.
The woman standing on the industrial catwalk thirty feet above them wore tactical fatigue trousers, a dark windbreaker, and an unbuttoned Kevlar vest. Her cheekbones were sharp, carved by months of privation and cold, her skin pale as skim milk under the fluorescent lamps. A thin, surgical scar ran from behind her left ear down into the collar of her shirt—the exact entry point of the shunt they had told Ethan was installed during her final, fatal neurosurgery.
"Clara," Ethan breathed. The room seemed to tilt on its axis.
She did not look at him with warmth. Her eyes, the deep hazel he had stared into across dining tables and hospital beds, were flat, clinical, and stripped of sentiment. In her hand, she held a handheld diagnostic unit wired directly into the facility's master breaker.
"Mommy," Julian whispered, squirming against Evelyn’s harness. "Mommy, the dark man has Leo."
Clara glanced down at Julian for a fraction of a second. A muscle feathered in her jaw, the only sign of human fracture in her marble expression. "Julian. You stayed in the wall like I told you."
"Clara, what is this?" Ethan shouted, stepping toward the center of the room. "They gave me a death certificate! I signed the release forms! I buried an empty coffin?"
"Not empty," Mercer shouted from behind the airlock glass, his voice cracking with hysteria. "It was filled with ninety pounds of medical waste and biocontainment concrete! She faked her terminal hemorrhage with synthetic coagulants! She vanished into the sub-levels because she knew the Department of Health was forty-eight hours away from raiding her lab!"
"Be quiet, Alistair," Clara said without looking at him. Her fingers danced over the diagnostic unit. "You always talked too much when you were scared. You took my research, locked me in Sector Three, and thought you could cultivate the harvest alone. But you never had the root code."
"The harvest?" Ethan felt a wave of nausea crash through him. "Clara, what are you talking about? What harvest?"
"Julian was born with a fatal telomere deletion syndrome, Ethan," Clara said, her voice deadened by the acoustics of the concrete bunker. "He should have died within forty-eight hours of birth. I kept him alive in the attic sanctuary with continuous micro-transfusions, but his marrow was burning out. I couldn't save him with synthetic medicine. I needed an exact genetic twin—an identical match with the defect spliced out."
Ethan’s stomach plummeted into an abyss. "Leo."
"Leo is Julian’s mirror," Clara said, finally looking down at Ethan. "He has your eyes, Ethan. He has my blood. But his cells do not degrade. I engineered him in vitro, incubated him, and brought him to term. He wasn't stolen from an outside surrogate. He was grown here, in the cold room beneath the wine cellar."
"You... you made our son to be spare parts?" Evelyn’s voice rose to a shriek. "You monster! You raised Julian like a ghost and bred Leo like cattle!"
"I kept my child alive!" Clara screamed back, the sudden volcanic rage shattering her icy facade. The sound rattled through the iron grating. "Neither of you had the stomach to do what was necessary! Ethan, you would have sat by a hospital bed, holding Julian’s hand while he choked on his own liquefied tissue, crying about God’s will! I chose to act! I chose science over surrender!"
"And look where it brought you!" Ethan yelled, tears of fury burning his eyes. "Look at them! Julian is traumatized, living in the dark! Leo is suffocating in an airlock! And you’re standing on a catwalk like an executioner!"
"I am here to finish the treatment," Clara said, her thumb hovering over the master key on her unit. "Mercer has the stabilizer in that syringe. It is the final synthesized batch. If I trigger the airlock cycle, the nitrogen will clear the room, Mercer will lose consciousness, and the chamber seals will open for sixty seconds. Long enough to extract Leo and administer the serum to Julian."
"And what happens to Leo?" Ethan demanded, his voice trembling. "What happens to the baby in that room if you flood it with nitrogen?"
Clara looked at the glass cubicle where eighteen-month-old Leo was weakly clawing at the transparent wall.
May you like
She didn't answer.
***
