Chapter 4 - Shadows in the Ventilation
I scooped Olivia up in my arms. Her body was terrifyingly light, her skin burning hot despite the damp chill of the lobby. Her eyes were rolled back, her lips pale blue.
"Emma, grab my belt and hold on tight," I ordered. "We're going to the holding cells."
The holding cell block was located in the rear basement of the building—a solid concrete bunker constructed decades before the recent digital retrofits. It had its own isolated air supply, thick iron-bar doors with manual lever locks, and no windows. It was the only place in the station that couldn't be instantly compromised by Vance's digital override or atmospheric venting.
We hurried down the narrow concrete stairwell, the darkness pressing in around the narrow beam of my flashlight. Behind us, the heavy metal fire door at the top of the stairs rattled violently as Vance pounded against it.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
"He's coming!" Emma whimpered, her small grip tightening on my duty belt.
"He can't get through this stairwell door easily," I said, though I knew the steel frame wouldn't hold forever if he had tools or explosive charges.
I reached the bottom of the stairs, pushed open the heavy door to the cell block, and ushered Emma inside. I laid Olivia flat on a wooden bench inside Cell 2, pulling a wool blanket from the storage locker to wrap around her shivering frame.
The cell block was silent save for the deep, rhythmic hum of the auxiliary generator located in the adjacent utility room. I checked the manual deadbolts on the cell block entrance—heavy iron bars that slid into thick stone housings. I threw the primary latch, locking us inside the corridor.
"Emma," I said, kneeling beside her in the dim yellow light of the emergency wall lamp. "Look at me."
She looked up, tears streaking the dirt and rain on her cheeks.
"Your father said the syringe you hid had a code inside it. Did you see anything else in that shoe before you put it on today?"
Emma shook her head, then stopped. She reached down to her left shoe—the one she hadn't taken off earlier.
"Not that shoe," she whispered, pointing to her left sneaker. "This one."
She pulled loose the left insole. Beneath it lay a tiny glass micro-vial, no larger than a sewing needle, filled with a clear, shimmering liquid.
"He told us we were playing a game," Emma said, her voice dropping to a fragile whisper. "He said if we kept the glass secret, we would win. But Olivia got scared and cried, so he made her take the blue tube first."
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Vance hadn't just used his children to store data—he had split a two-part biological mechanism between them. One twin carried the vector; the other carried the primary sequence.
Above us, the air ducts began to rattle again. Vance was inside the basement ventilation framework.
