Chapter 15 - The Voice Beyond Northstar
Clara let the telephone ring seven times.
Margaret had once taught her that impatient callers revealed themselves before careful listeners did. On the eighth ring, Clara lifted the receiver.
No one spoke.
She heard wind, a distant engine, and three bell tones separated by equal pauses.
The orchard sequence.
“When the last branch bends,” Clara said, “the hidden daughter comes home.”
A man's voice answered.
“Wrong daughter.”
The line went dead.
Clara traced the call through equipment Warren installed after the Northstar disclosure. The signal had bounced through obsolete emergency exchanges and ended at a maritime station decommissioned before Clara was born.
On the desk, Margaret's photograph shifted when Clara replaced the receiver. A narrow envelope slid from behind the frame.
It had not been there during earlier searches.
Someone had entered the house after the cameras were removed.
Inside was a page from Saint Orison's birth ledger. Unlike the copy beneath the orchard, this page listed a fourth infant.
INFANT D: MALE. TRANSFER AUTHORITY UNKNOWN.
Beneath the entry, someone had written in fresh ink:
Northstar was the selection program. It was never the command.
Clara called Warren, but his phone went directly to a recorded message. She called Morales. No answer. The task-force emergency channel returned only static.
Then the television in Margaret's study turned on by itself.
A live feed showed Chief Warren seated in an unfamiliar room. His hands were free. He did not appear injured. Behind him hung a symbol Clara had seen only once, scratched beneath the foundation stone at Sterling Orchard: a circle divided by four vertical lines.
Warren looked into the camera.
“Clara, do not come for me,” he said. “That is what they expect.”
A figure moved behind him.
The screen went black.
Clara opened the Northstar victim registry and searched the symbol. No result appeared. She searched Margaret's surviving files. The same mark existed in the corner of seven documents, each older than Northstar Meridian. One referred to a project called Dominion House. Another described Northstar as a regional instrument authorized to identify potential successors for an unnamed council.
Northstar had not been the top of the structure.
It had been an entrance examination.
A car stopped outside.
Clara moved to the window with her weapon ready.
Sienna stepped from a prison transport accompanied by two officers. She was not scheduled to report until Monday.
One officer approached the front door while the other remained beside the vehicle.
Clara called the department dispatcher.
“No transport was authorized,” the dispatcher said.
The front bell rang.
Sienna looked toward the upstairs window and subtly raised her left hand. Four fingers open, thumb closed.
The old emergency signal for multiple hostile captors.
Clara descended without turning on the lights.
At the rear door, Mara waited in the shadows. Blood marked her collar, and she carried the encrypted command-list drive.
“They took Warren,” Clara whispered.
“They took Voss too,” Mara replied. “Before she disappeared, she told me Northstar had one final subject it never found.”
“The fourth infant?”
Mara shook her head.
“You.”
Clara stared at her.
Mara placed the drive in Clara's hand. A new partition had appeared inside it, opened by the Saint Orison disclosure. It contained a single video dated one hour before Margaret's death.
Margaret appeared on screen, weak but alert.
“Clara, if Dominion House contacts you, the truth about your birth will be used to make you doubt every choice you have made. Remember this: blood explains nothing. Design excuses nothing. You are responsible only for what you choose after learning the truth.”
Margaret paused to catch her breath.
“I told Northstar you were Subject A. I lied.”
Clara stopped breathing.
“You were not born at Saint Orison. You were brought there three days later by a man whose identity I never discovered. Helena accepted you because your blood matched a line she had searched for all her life.”
The recording flickered.
“Dominion does not want you because you survived Northstar. Northstar existed because Dominion was searching for you.”
Outside, the false officer rang the bell again.
Sienna stood perfectly still beside the transport. Mara checked the rear alley and counted two more vehicles approaching without headlights.
On the drive, a final document opened.
It contained a photograph of the unknown man from Margaret's hidden family portrait. He stood beside the intelligence aircraft, younger but unmistakable.
Beneath the photograph was his title.
COMMANDER GABRIEL STERLING, DOMINION DEFECTOR.
Clara had never known a Gabriel Sterling.
According to the attached death record, he had died thirty years ago.
According to the live security camera that suddenly activated at the gate, the same man was standing outside Sterling House now.
He had not aged.
The false officers lowered their weapons and stepped away from Sienna.
The man looked directly toward Clara's darkened window.
Then he raised his hand in a formal salute.
Clara remembered Margaret's first warning.
Do not trust the man who salutes you first.
But Chief Warren had not been the first man to salute her.
Someone had done it when she was an infant, before her stolen life began.
Gabriel Sterling smiled at the camera.
May you like
The gates opened without Clara touching the controls.
And all across the house, doors Margaret had kept locked for decades began opening one by one.
