Chapter 14 - The Empty Cell
Diane’s detention cell had been locked.
Two cameras covered the corridor.
A guard sat twelve feet from the door.
Yet at 5:03 a.m., the cameras showed static for forty-seven seconds.
When the image returned, the cell was empty.
The guard remembered hearing Diane cough.
He remembered checking the door.
He did not remember the static.
A small puncture mark was found beneath his jaw.
Mark remained in custody.
When Lena told him his mother had escaped, he began to panic.
“She’ll think I talked.”
“Did you?” Lena asked.
“No.”
“Then why are you afraid?”
Mark stared at the interview-room mirror.
“You don’t understand her.”
Natalie watched from the observation room with Ethan and Rebecca.
Her surgical incision pulled whenever she breathed, but she refused to return to bed.
Lena placed photographs from the institute in front of Mark.
“Tell me where she would go.”
“I don’t know.”
“The Mercer house?”
“Too obvious.”
“A clinic?”
“She owns dozens.”
“Name the ones not on public records.”
“I don’t know.”
Lena leaned closer.
“You spent years helping your mother imprison and assault your wife. Cooperation is the only useful thing you have left.”
Mark looked toward the mirror.
He knew Natalie was watching.
“I loved her.”
Natalie’s stomach turned.
Lena said, “You loved what she gave you.”
“I protected her.”
“You held her down.”
“My mother controlled everything.”
“You could have walked away.”
“She would have destroyed me.”
“So you let her destroy Natalie instead.”
Mark began to cry.
It might have moved Natalie once.
Now she saw the precision of it.
The trembling lip.
The lowered voice.
The man asking to be comforted after helping cause another person’s pain.
Lena pushed a legal pad toward him.
“Write every location.”
Mark picked up the pen.
For several minutes, he wrote addresses.
Most were properties Natalie had never heard of.
An abandoned maternity clinic.
A private recovery center.
A lake house owned through a foundation.
A storage facility beneath the old Mercer surgical plant.
Then he stopped.
“There is one more.”
Lena waited.
“My grandfather’s original laboratory.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then how do you know it exists?”
“I went there once as a child.”
“What do you remember?”
“No windows. A freight elevator. The smell of salt water.”
“Near the coast?”
“Maybe.”
“What else?”
Mark closed his eyes.
“A train horn.”
Rebecca stepped closer to the glass.
“There is an abandoned Marrow facility near the northern rail port.”
Ethan looked at her.
“The building burned twenty years ago.”
“The upper floors burned.”
Lena entered the observation room.
“You know it?”
Rebecca nodded.
“It was where they held me after the accident.”
Natalie looked at her.
“You never told me.”
“I was trying to be certain.”
“About what?”
Rebecca removed the brass music-box key from her neck.
“This key does not only open your childhood music box.”
She pressed the side.
A narrow metal blade extended from the shaft.
A security key.
“The Mercers gave it to your father when he worked at the rail-port facility.”
“My father worked for them?”
“He designed storage systems.”
“For the program?”
“He thought they were storing transplant tissue.”
“And when he learned the truth?”
“He planned to expose them.”
“The car accident.”
Rebecca nodded.
“Diane arranged it.”
Natalie looked through the glass at Mark.
“Does he know?”
“No.”
“Bring him.”
Lena hesitated.
“Why?”
“Because Diane may contact him.”
“She may also kill him.”
Natalie felt nothing at the thought.
But Mark was still useful.
They transferred him under heavy guard to the hospital’s secure wing. His tracking device transmitted continuously.
At noon, his attorney arrived with a clean suit and a private meal.
The food passed inspection.
The suit did not.
Inside the collar, officers found a tiny strip of paper.
COME HOME, MY SON.
Beneath the words was a divided-circle symbol and a series of numbers.
Rebecca recognized them as rail coordinates.
Lena organized a state tactical team.
Natalie demanded to go.
“No,” Lena said.
“She wants me.”
“That is exactly why you cannot go.”
“She escaped because the capsule matters.”
“And you just survived surgery.”
“Diane has built every plan around people doing what keeps them safe. She expects me to hide.”
Ethan stepped beside Natalie.
“She may be right.”
Lena looked at him.
“You are not helping.”
“The facility may contain medical locks keyed to Natalie’s blood markers.”
“That is a guess.”
“A reasonable one.”
Rebecca placed the brass key on the table.
“I’m going.”
Natalie looked at her mother.
After a long silence, Lena agreed on one condition.
Natalie and Rebecca would remain inside an armored command vehicle unless specifically needed.
Mark would be transported separately as bait.
At sunset, the convoy reached the abandoned rail port.
The ruined Marrow facility stood beyond rusted tracks, its upper walls blackened by the old fire.
A train horn sounded in the distance.
Mark began shouting from the transport vehicle.
“She knows we’re here.”
A freight elevator beneath the ruins activated by itself.
Its metal doors opened.
Inside stood a little girl.
She appeared to be no older than eight.
She wore a white hospital gown.
Blood marked one bare foot.
Natalie ran from the command vehicle before anyone could stop her.
The child looked directly at her.
“Natalie?”
Natalie froze.
“How do you know my name?”
The girl held out a silver box engraved with the divided circle.
“Grandmother said you would come.”
Behind the elevator doors, darkness stretched underground.
A woman’s voice spoke through the intercom.
It was Diane.
“Bring me the sixteenth carrier, and I will release the child.”
Natalie looked at the girl.
“What is your name?”
May you like
The child’s lips trembled.
“Anna.”
