Chapter 70 - The Quarantine Tribunal
We were not taken to a Boston hospital. We were not taken to an FBI field office.
We were flown three hundred miles inland to a subterranean military installation carved into the granite of the Appalachian mountains. Miller was separated from me the moment the transport touched down on the tarmac, dragged away on a gurney by armed operatives wearing full NBC biohazard suits.
For seventy-two hours, I was locked inside an airtight containment cell constructed of mirrored glass and brushed steel. Leo was kept in an isolation incubator on the other side of the glass—visible, but untouched. Every three hours, anonymous technicians in white suits entered to draw my blood, take tissue samples from my healing wounds, and measure the electrical conductance of my nervous system.
They never spoke to me.
On the fourth morning, the blast door hissed open, and a man in a tailored charcoal suit walked into the observation room, holding a thick, declassified dossier stamped with the Department of Defense seal. He was tall, with silver hair cropped close to his skull, and cold, calculating eyes that looked at me not as a human being, but as an equation.
"Mrs. Vance," he said, pulling up a steel chair on the other side of the glass. "I am Director Vance-Cross. Before you ask, yes, I am a second cousin of your late father. And no, I do not care about family reunions."
"Where is Detective Miller?" I demanded, my hands pressed flat against the glass, my eyes locked on Leo sleeping peacefully in his pod. "Where is my baby?"
"Detective Miller is currently in intensive care, undergoing debriefing and NDA processing," the Director replied smoothly, opening the dossier. "His pension has been multiplied tenfold. His silence is guaranteed. As for the infant... he is no longer your property."
"He is my son!" I screamed, slamming my fists against the partition.
"He is the primary carrier of the synthetic genome Eleanor synthesized at St. Jude's," Vance-Cross said calmly. "And you, Elizabeth, are the only living adult host whose marrow has successfully adapted to the catalyst without suffering terminal neural decay. Did you really think Eleanor was working alone? An offshore research installation of that scale doesn't exist without sovereign backing."
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He leaned forward, tapping the glass.
"Your mother was a pawn. Victoria was a decoy. Eleanor was the researcher. But the Vance Corporation's real contract was with the Department’s Advanced Biological Defense division. You survived the fall from the balcony because your father had been micro-dosing your infant formulas with the precursor twenty-five years ago. You were never meant to escape Fort Vance. You were meant to be brought here."
