CHAPTER 21 REBECCA’S SECOND HEART
Dniel fired at the ceiling vents.
The first bullet tore through metal.
The gas continued.
“Emergency ventilation!” Mara shouted.
Emily reached the server station.
“The controls are encrypted.”
Charles remained behind the steel barrier.
He appeared exhausted, but not afraid.
Daniel crossed the room and struck the glass between them.
“Open the doors.”
“I can’t.”
“Then why are you here?”
Charles touched the burn on his neck.
“They put something inside me.”
Rebecca pressed her palm against the central monitor.
The children’s heartbeats remained synchronized with hers.
She closed her eyes.
“Slow down.”
“What?” Daniel asked.
“The system is following my pulse.”
Rebecca controlled her breathing.
Her heartbeat began to slow.
The ventilation fans slowed with it.
Emily understood.
“The environmental controls are connected to the biometric network.”
“If Rebecca’s heartbeat controls the system,” Mara said, “she may be able to reverse the airflow.”
Rebecca concentrated.
The monitors dropped from eighty beats per minute to sixty.
Then fifty-two.
Daniel watched her face turn pale.
“Rebecca, stop.”
“Not yet.”
At forty-eight beats per minute, the fans changed direction.
The gas was pulled from the rooms.
Mara opened the emergency doors manually.
Daniel and federal agents began evacuating the children.
Rebecca collapsed against the monitor.
Her heartbeat continued falling.
Forty-two.
Thirty-nine.
Daniel pulled her hand away.
The synchronized connection broke.
Rebecca gasped.
The children’s monitors returned to normal.
Behind the glass, Charles fell to one knee.
Mara cut through the locking mechanism.
They dragged him into the medical chamber.
Emily kept her weapon pointed at his chest.
“Did you know about these children?”
“No.”
“You expect me to believe you?”
“No.”
For the first time, Charles did not try to defend himself.
“They took me from the transport. I woke up here.”
Mara examined the burn beneath his neck.
“It’s a tracking implant.”
Charles laughed bitterly.
“It’s more than that.”
He removed a folded paper from his pocket.
“I found this beside me when I woke.”
The paper contained four words.
RETURN THE CORRECTION HOME.
Daniel looked toward the steel door Charles had entered through.
It led to an empty tunnel.
No footprints.
No security footage.
Someone had delivered Charles through the building without appearing on a single camera.
Rebecca sat beside the rescued girl.
“What is your name?”
“Lena.”
“Who brought you here?”
“The doctors.”
“Which doctors?”
“The ones without faces.”
Lena touched Rebecca’s wrist.
“They said your first heart belonged to your family.”
Rebecca’s face tightened.
“And the second?”
“To us.”
A scan revealed that Rebecca’s implant was larger than doctors had believed.
The original device had been removed at Black Harbor.
But a second component remained attached to the tissue surrounding her heart.
It could not be extracted without major surgery.
Worse, it was transmitting.
Not to one location.
To ten.
Each signal corresponded to a remaining House.
Rebecca had become a living connection to the entire Meridian network.
Emily searched the hospital database.
Most files had been destroyed.
One survived.
PRIMARY VESSEL R-0
MATERNAL LINE: VALE
FUNCTION: BIOLOGICAL CONTINUITY
STATUS: ACTIVE
Rebecca stared at the screen.
“Vale?”
Daniel remembered Jonas’s warning.
You carry the first living route.
“Your parents,” he said. “Were they really your parents?”
Rebecca looked away.
“I was adopted.”
“You never told me.”
“I didn’t know until I was seventeen.”
“Who arranged the adoption?”
“Vivian Whitmore.”
Emily’s grandmother had saved Daniel from Meridian.
She had also placed Rebecca in his life.
Rebecca’s voice became unsteady.
“She introduced us.”
Daniel remembered the small bookstore in Prague.
Rebecca had dropped a box of files.
Daniel had helped gather the papers.
She had smiled at him.
He had believed it was an accident.
Nothing was an accident.
A nurse entered with Lena’s blood results.
Her face was pale.
“There’s something else.”
The thirty-one children did not share DNA with Rebecca.
But every one of them carried a small sequence matching Daniel.
Not enough to make them his biological children.
Enough to prove someone had used his genetic material.
May you like
Lena looked up at him.
“The doctors called us your unfinished family.”
