Chapter 43 - Two Drops of Blood
The silence that followed Julian’s declaration was deafening. Above them, the rhythmic mechanical sigh of Maya’s respirator seemed to mock the fragile illusion of their safety.
"The harvest?" Leah screamed, clawing her way to her feet, her hands curled into claws. "They are babies! Maya is our daughter! We conceived her! We had ultrasounds, we had nine months of doctor appointments—how dare you call her a harvest!"
Julian looked at Leah with a mixture of pity and cold detachment. "You believe you conceived naturally, Mrs. Miller? Did you never wonder why you struggled for four years with unexplained infertility? Did you never question the miraculous success of that small, private fertility clinic in Chicago that suddenly offered you a free round of treatment through an anonymous charitable endowment?"
Leah’s breath hitched. Her hand flew to her mouth.
"No..." she whimpered, backing away until her spine struck the cold edge of the central surgical station. "No, the doctors said... they said my hormone levels had finally balanced..."
"Every vial was ours," Julian said, his voice flat and absolute. "Your womb was an incubator, Leah. A vessel chosen for its pristine immunological profile. Maya was never an accident of nature. She was the realization of Project Phoenix. An engineered duplicate, possessing the genetic corrections that Subject Alpha lacked."
"And the other one?" David demanded, his voice thick with rage, clutching Asset 409 closer against his chest. "Where did she come from?"
"Asset 409 is the shadow," Julian explained, gesturing vaguely toward the sprawling circular rows of empty glass bassinets that filled the perimeter of the room. "When a prototype of such immense financial and biological value is cultivated inside an external surrogate, a parallel baseline must be grown concurrently in our artificial chambers. A biological backup. If the primary subject fails or suffers systemic degradation—as Maya currently is—the secondary subject provides the cellular material necessary for the cure."
David’s heart went ice-cold. "What cellular material?"
Julian walked to the side of the pod, tapping the interface. A mechanical drawer slid out with a low pneumatic hiss, revealing a row of hollow-bore surgical needles connected to an automated centrifuge.
"Maya has suffered severe acute pulmonary failure caused by a manufactured viral antigen deployed by the retrieval team on the highway," Julian said matter-of-factly. "It was designed to incapacitate, to force you here. Her bone marrow is shutting down. In thirty minutes, her organs will begin cascading into multi-system failure. The only thing that can restart her immune system is an immediate, unfiltered hematopoietic stem-cell extraction from a genetically identical living twin."
"Extraction," Leah repeated, her voice rising in hysteria. "What happens to the baby you take it from?"
Julian looked directly into David’s eyes. "A full systemic harvest from an infant of this size is non-survivable. The donor will expire on the table."
David stared at the old man, his vision swimming in red. "You want me to hand you this child so you can kill her to save the other?"
May you like
"I am not asking you to kill a stranger," Julian said softly, stepping closer until David could smell the mint and tobacco on his breath. "I am telling you that you hold two identical copies of the exact same soul. One was raised inside your wife’s body; the other was incubated in a tank. But their blood is one. Choose, David. Choose which Maya walks out of this room."
***
