Chapter 16 - The Whispering Code
The sedan tore through the rain-slicked city streets, cutting through red lights and plunging into the maze of industrial warehouses near the eastern shipping docks. Vance drove like a woman possessed, checking her mirrors every three seconds while speaking rapidly into an encrypted satellite communicator.
"They deployed an alpha-tier strike team in broad daylight," Vance said grimly, tossing the device onto the passenger seat after getting no response. "My director isn't answering. The bureau channel is dead. That means Aethelgard has compromised federal communications, or they have assets inside the regional field office."
"We’re on our own," I said, catching my breath while stroking Lily’s damp hair.
She was shivering, her forehead burning with an abnormal, unnatural heat. Her eyes were half-open, gazing unfocused at the ceiling of the car. Her lips were moving soundlessly, forming repetitive, rhythmic syllables.
"Lily? Lily, look at me," I pleaded, terror clawing at my throat. "Look at Daddy."
Her eyes focused slowly, locking onto mine. "Dad... there are numbers in my ears. Like a clock counting backward."
"What numbers, honey?"
"Eight, four, seven, zero... delta," she whispered, her voice layered with an odd, hollow cadence that didn't sound entirely like a child. "Mom made me memorize a rhyme when I was little. She said if I ever got very sick, I had to recite it."
My mind flashed back to the nursery rhymes Emily used to force Lily to recite before bed—rhymes that never made sense, strings of nonsensical words wrapped in singsong melodies. Emily hadn't been teaching her bedtime stories; she had been conditioning her to hold an encryption key.
"Vance, Emily left a protocol inside her head," I said, leaning forward between the front seats. "Lily's memory holds the decipher key."
"Which means they don't just want her for her blood," Vance realized, her jaw clenching. "Lily is the hardware and the password. If Aethelgard recovers her alive, they extract the bio-data and wipe whatever personality she has left to preserve the integrity of the project. If they can't have her, they'll eliminate the asset to prevent corporate exposure."
"Where can we go?" I demanded. "If your agency is compromised, nowhere in the state is safe."
"There is one place," Vance replied, veering sharply off the highway onto a dark, unpaved logging road that wound into the dense timberline of the northern ridge. "An off-the-books research outpost abandoned by the CDC six years ago. An old colleague of mine, a rogue biochemist named Dr. Jonathan Sterling, has been living off the grid there. He was one of the whistleblowers who tried to expose Aethelgard before they erased his career."
"Is he the voice from the cassette?" I asked, recalling the doctor’s panicked whisper from the night of Lily’s birth.
"Yes," Vance said quietly. "If anyone knows how to stop the countdown inside Lily without killing her, it’s him."
May you like
Behind us, in the distant gloom of the highway, two sets of headlights crested the ridge, tracking our trajectory through the dark woods.
***