Chapter 10 - Darkness and Deals
The silence that followed the power failure lasted only three seconds before the emergency generator roared to life in the basement, bathing the corridors in an eerie, pulsing amber warning light. The monitors began to whine, their backup batteries emitting sharp, periodic chirps that signaled a critical failure in the external power lines.
"The perimeter line was cut from the road," Clara whispered, peering through the high security window near the entrance. "They found us. The tracker bought us time, but someone had a secondary trace on the chassis."
Dr. Thorne emerged from the theatre, his surgical gown speckled with saline solution. "The child is intubated, but his heart cannot maintain perfusion on its own. I have fifty-five seconds to connect him to the bypass circuit. If I don't have that override key, his brain will be deprived of oxygen within three minutes."
Ethan stood in the amber gloom, feeling the walls closing in around his family. He walked over to Clara. "Your father's tablet. The executive liaison interface you used to monitor Mercer Logistics during the merger negotiations. Do you still have it?"
Clara frowned, reaching into her bag and pulling out a slim aluminum slate. "Yes, but the corporate portal requires two-factor biometric verification from a direct Mercer board member. Arthur is the only primary keyholder."
"No," Ethan said, his voice dropping into a register of cold, absolute authority. "He isn't. When my mother died, she left twenty-two percent of Mercer Logistics in a blind trust in my name. Arthur told me the shares were non-voting until I reached thirty-five. But corporate bypasses aren't based on voting rights—they are based on asset registration."
Ethan pressed his thumb against the slate's glass scanner. The device whirred, processing the whorls of his skin, cross-referencing them with the corporate registries locked away in the city servers. For ten agonizing seconds, the screen flickered between red denial prompts and yellow diagnostic lines.
May you like
Then, a voice boomed from the overhead clinic intercom, crisp and chillingly familiar.
"Good evening, Ethan," Arthur Mercer said through the hacked administrative circuit. "Step outside, and the doctor gets his code. Stay inside, and I lock the registry permanently."
