Chapter 33 - The Chimera Protocol
The words hung in the sterile, humid air like a guillotine blade.
"What did you just say?" Marcus whispered, his blood running colder than the concrete floor beneath his feet.
Eleanor shifted against the wall, wincing as the zip-ties cut into her wrists, but her gaze never wavered from Chloe’s convulsing frame. "Your wife, Marcus. Do you really believe her death during childbirth was a tragic complication? Do you truly believe that sweet, compliant Sarah died of an unexpected hemorrhage?"
Marcus’s vision tunneled. The memory of that rainy November night six years ago slammed into him—the sudden code blue alarms, the terrified faces of the surgical team, the cold sheet pulled over the face of the woman he loved more than life itself.
"Shut your mouth, Eleanor," Arthur warned, raising his weapon. "Don't poison his mind with your sickness."
"Let her speak!" Marcus shouted, his voice cracking with unbearable agony. He turned to Eleanor, stepping over the surgical debris until he stood towering over his mother. "Tell me what you did to my wife. Tell me right now!"
"Sarah was an employee of Vance Biotech before she ever met you, darling," Eleanor purred, relishing every drop of Marcus’s torment. "We chose her. We engineered your courtship. We needed a maternal host with a specific chromosomal variance—one that could carry a synthetic genetic sequence without rejecting the blastocyst. Chloe wasn't conceived in passion, Marcus. She was commissioned."
Marcus struck the steel cabinet behind Eleanor’s head, denting the heavy metal with his bare knuckles. "You're lying! She was my daughter! We chose her name together!"
"Look at her blood, Marcus!" Eleanor screamed back, her aristocratic veneer finally splintering into raw, venomous fury. "Look at the monitors! Why do you think her platelet count has never matched human baseline? Why do you think every pediatric specialist who questioned her blood work ended up reassigned or dead? The Vance fortune wasn't built on hospitals, boy. It was built on life extension patents sold to the highest bidders in the defense sector! And Chloe... Chloe carries the only living, stabilized sample of the Telomerase-9 sequence in her bone marrow!"
Callagher suddenly gasped from the table. "Marcus! Look at this!"
Marcus spun around. The clear plastic IV tubing running from Chloe’s arm wasn't carrying red blood anymore. Through the transparent line, the fluid drawn into the syringe barrel glowed with a faint, iridescent luminescence—a horrifying chemical phosphorescence that defied all laws of human biology.
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Chloe arched her back with a silent scream, her tiny hands locking onto Marcus’s jacket with impossible, crushing strength.
***
