Chapter 12 - The Activator
"You lying bitch!" I screamed into the screen. "He's your son!"
"He's an asset, Mark. Just like you were," Elena said, her voice devoid of a single shred of humanity. "You think a woman like me ends up with a suburban civil engineer by accident? Your mother spent thirty years hoarding three hundred million dollars in synthetic patent portfolios that belonged to my mother. She cut us off without a penny."
"He is a seven-year-old child!"
"And within twenty minutes, that activator will cause his marrow to express the exact stem cell antigens required to authorize the trust transfer," she said, leaning toward the camera. "Bring him home, Mark. Bring him to the living room. Or I activate the fail-safe on your pantry circuit breaker."
"What did you do to the house?"
"Ten pounds of industrial hexogen wired to your natural gas intake line," she replied calmly. "The entire cul-de-sac goes up in flames if I don't punch in my check-in code every fifteen minutes. You have twelve minutes left. Drive."
The screen went black.
Beside me, Toby let out a sharp gasp.
I looked down. The faint gray lines under his collarbone weren't fading anymore. They had turned a deep, luminescent violet, pulsing beneath the skin with terrifying intensity.
His eyes rolled back, and a violent tremor ran through his limbs.
"Cross!" I yelled, spinning toward the detective. "What was the red injector? In the cryo-flask!"
Cross grabbed the case from the van bumper, inspecting the second tube with the red band. "The label says Carrier Reverse. It’s an immunosuppressive neutralizer."
"If the green one turns it on," I said, my mind racing through basic chemical logic, "the red one shuts it down."
"Or it shuts his heart down completely," Cross warned, grabbing my wrist. "Mark, this is experimental biotech. If you guess wrong, you kill him yourself."
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"He’s dying anyway!" I ripped the red auto-injector from the foam, uncapping the safety needle. "Get in your car and follow me. If that house blows, nobody gets out alive."
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