“I said be quiet!”
He lunged with the needle.
I wasn’t as weak as I pretended. I had been practicing yoga for two years under his “supervision” to improve my focus. I knew how to use my core. I arched my back, throwing Mrs. Ellen off balance, and grabbed Marcus’s wrist with both hands.
We struggled, the gurney creaking under the weight. Mrs. Ellen screamed, reaching for a heavy glass carafe on the side table.
“Sign it!” she shrieked. “Marcus, just kill her and we’ll forge the rest!”
“I can’t forge a live biometric scan!” Marcus roared, trying to force the needle into my arm.
I twisted his wrist, using his own momentum against him. He was a man of books and labs; I was a woman fueled by two years of stolen autonomy and a mother’s silent tears on a screen.
The needle plunged, but not into me. It sank into Marcus’s own thigh as we tumbled off the gurney onto the cold tile floor.
He gasped, his eyes going wide. He tried to pull the syringe out, but the amber liquid was already disappearing into his muscle.
“No,” he whispered. “No, no…”
“What is it, Marcus?” I asked, crawling away from him, my breath coming in ragged gasps. “The ‘Final Phase’? What does it do?”
He didn’t answer. His tongue seemed to thicken in his mouth. He looked at his mother, his hand reaching out like a child’s.
Mrs. Ellen didn’t move toward him. She moved toward the red folder.
“Useless,” she muttered, looking at her son with a chilling detachment. “Just like your father. All that brilliance, and you let a drugged girl outsmart you.”
She grabbed the folder and turned toward the hidden door.
“You’re not leaving,” I said, standing up on shaky legs. I grabbed the heavy black notebook—the record of my torture—and threw it at the monitor. It didn’t break the screen, but it hit the ‘unmute’ button I had seen Marcus press.
My mother’s voice filled the room again, but this time, it wasn’t a plea.
“The police are in the driveway, Ellen,” my mother said, her face hardening on the screen. “I didn’t just find the feed. I gave them the coordinates of the hidden room. They’re five minutes away.”
Mrs. Ellen froze. She looked at the hidden door, then at me, then at her son, who was now twitching on the floor, his eyes rolling back into his head.
“You think you’ve won?” Ellen sneered, reaching into her coat pocket. She didn’t pull out a gun. She pulled out a small remote. “This house is registered as a medical research facility. It has a ‘biohazard’ protocol. If I press this, the ventilation seals and the oxygen is scrubbed. We all go to sleep, Lucia. Forever.”
“You’d kill your own son?” I asked, horrified.
She looked down at Marcus. “He’s already gone. That dose… he designed it to be irreversible. Total cognitive wipe. He’s the vegetable now.”
