Chapter 28 - The Ghost of St. Jude's
The hospital where I was born—and where I lost my child—loomed over the East River like a gothic fortress made of gray stone and blackened glass.
St. Jude’s Memorial Hospital was currently crawling with federal agents, their blue windbreakers flashing behind the frosted glass doors of the private executive wing. The entire fourteenth floor, long designated as a "private donor research lab," was sealed behind quarantine tape.
Daniel wheeled me down the long, empty hallway of the abandoned neonatal research unit. The air smelled of industrial bleach and decaying flowers left behind by staff who had fled when the warrants were executed.
"Why did you bring me here, Daniel?" I asked, staring at the empty incubators lined up behind the soundproof glass.
"Because the ledger Thorne showed you is missing seven pages," Daniel said, stopping the wheelchair in front of an unmarked wooden door at the end of the corridor. The gold lettering on the frosted glass had been scraped off, leaving only the faint shadow of a name: *Dr. Arthur Vance, Honorary Chair of Genetics.*
Daniel pulled an iron key from his pocket—the key recovered from Raymond Sterling’s private vault beneath the mausoleum. He slid it into the lock and turned it. The mechanism engaged with a heavy, oiled thud.
Inside, the office was preserved in amber. Floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookshelves were lined with vintage medical journals from the 1970s and 80s. On the desk sat an old green-screen computer terminal, still humming quietly on a dedicated uninterrupted power supply, its phosphor screen displaying a command prompt.
Daniel walked around the desk, typed a four-digit code from the ledger—*1 9 9 4*—and pressed Enter.
A list of encrypted patient files populated the screen. But what caught my attention wasn't the screen. It was the framed photograph sitting face-down on the edge of the mahogany desk.
I reached out, my fingers cold as ice, and set the frame upright.
The photograph showed three people standing on the manicured lawn of the Vance estate thirty years ago: a young Arthur Senior, a twenty-year-old Eleanor holding an infant... and a young, dark-haired doctor with cold, piercing gray eyes.
"That's Dr. Harold Vogel," I whispered.
"Look at the child, Elizabeth," Daniel said softly, standing behind me. "Look at the medical wristband on the baby's arm in the picture."
I leaned in closer, squinting through the magnifying glass on the desk.
The wristband didn't say *Elizabeth Vance*.
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It read: *Subject Zero-A. Genetic Twin to Donor Arthur Vance.*
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