Chapter 7 - ST. ORISON
Detective Ortiz left for St. Orison before sunrise with a tactical team.
She ordered Claire to remain under guard.
Claire agreed until she saw the preliminary DNA report.
The fetus was genetically hers.
Daniel was not the biological father.
Claire read the line three times.
“Run it again.”
Dr. Bell stood beside the window.
“We did.”
“There must be contamination.”
“The samples were collected independently.”
Claire looked at Dr. Patel.
“Who is the father?”
“We don’t know.”
Daniel’s court-ordered sample had revealed something else.
He shared several engineered genetic markers with the fetus, but not enough to be the biological parent.
Dr. Bell explained that Daniel was more likely related to the father.
“A brother?” Claire asked.
“Possibly.”
“Daniel is an only child.”
“Officially.”
Claire requested another video call.
Daniel appeared after refusing twice.
When she showed him the report, his face collapsed.
“They told me it was mine.”
“Who?”
“My mother.”
“Who is the biological father?”
“I don’t know.”
“You built a laboratory beneath our house.”
“My mother built it.”
“You watched her drug me.”
“I thought the treatment was necessary.”
“You allowed embryos to be placed inside me.”
Daniel rubbed both hands over his face.
“The first transfers failed. She said your immune system destroyed them.”
“You say that as though they were experiments.”
“I wanted a family.”
“You wanted a successful result.”
“That isn’t true.”
“Then tell me who F-05’s father is.”
Daniel looked toward the camera.
“There was a donor.”
“Name.”
“I never saw him.”
“Was he related to you?”
“My mother said he carried the Hale line more purely than I did.”
Claire felt a new kind of fear.
“What does that mean?”
Daniel’s jaw tightened.
“My father was not my biological father.”
“Who was?”
“I was raised not to ask.”
Claire leaned closer.
“Daniel, what is Project Eve?”
He looked down.
“A lineage program.”
“For what?”
“My grandfather believed certain immune traits could be combined to produce resistance.”
“Resistance to disease?”
“To control.”
The answer made no sense.
Daniel continued.
“Bellwether studied how memory, attachment, fear, and obedience could be chemically influenced. Your mother’s work made some subjects resistant.”
“Subjects?”
“Children.”
Claire closed her eyes.
“Why would my mother participate?”
“She tried to destroy the research.”
“Then why am I altered?”
“Because she tested the resistance treatment on you before Bellwether could use you.”
Claire opened her eyes.
“And my baby?”
“F-05 may have inherited both the Hale susceptibility markers and your resistance.”
“Meaning?”
Daniel’s voice lowered.
“The child may be immune to the conditioning compound.”
Claire thought of the drink.
“They were testing whether the baby survived exposure.”
“Yes.”
“You knew.”
“I thought the doses were protecting the pregnancy.”
“You never asked why a pregnant woman needed memory-suppressing drugs?”
Daniel looked at her with tears in his eyes.
“I was told you would leave if you remembered.”
“Remembered what?”
He did not answer.
Claire stood too quickly.
The room tilted, but she remained upright.
“What did you do to me?”
Daniel whispered, “We met before you think we did.”
The video feed ended from his side.
Claire tried to call again.
A nurse entered carrying an overnight delivery box.
“No deliveries are allowed,” Claire said.
The nurse stopped.
“I was told this was cleared by police.”
Dr. Patel examined the label.
There was no sender.
Ortiz was still traveling toward St. Orison and could not be reached.
The bomb squad was called.
The box contained no explosive.
Inside was a child’s red sweater, a cassette tape, and a photograph of Claire at nineteen.
Daniel stood beside her in the photograph.
Claire stared at his younger face.
She had no memory of him.
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On the back, someone had written:
THE FIRST WEDDING WAS ERASED.
