Chapter 4 - The Price of a Blood Test
"My mom is alive?" I asked.
Jonah stared at the screen. "I believed she died during the first trial. Victoria has been hiding her from me."
"You work in this place. How could you not know?"
He didn't defend himself. "She kept me in the research wing. She kept the patients somewhere else. I accepted too many locked doors."
0C touched the glass tank beside her. Inside, a silver-haired version of Elena opened her eyes.
"Does she have a name?" 0C asked.
"Specimen E-19," Jonah answered automatically.
The girl flinched. "That's not a name."
I turned on him. "How many people did you let them make?"
"The first trial was supposed to grow replacement tissue. Not people. I stayed because I thought I could shut it down without killing the patients."
"And twenty-two years later?"
He looked away.
I took Evelyn's old key from the chain around my neck. She'd called it a keepsake from the hospital where I was born. Jonah recognized the tiny copper teeth immediately.
"That's Elena's emergency release key."
"Evelyn gave it to me on my eighteenth birthday."
"Then she's been waiting for you to find this place."
The blue-veined girl from the forest appeared on the outside camera. She stood beside Marcus and grabbed a rifle from his good hand. Victoria slapped her.
"Cora," Victoria snapped, "you had one job."
Cora. The name sounded like someone I'd known once and forgotten.
She didn't fire at Victoria. She aimed at the camera instead, then whispered four words before the picture shattered.
"Evelyn knows the switch."
At the same moment, a drawer in Jonah's desk clicked open. Inside lay an envelope addressed to me in my mother's handwriting.
May you like
It had been sealed twenty-two years ago.
Across the back, Elena had written: IF THERE ARE THREE, RUN FROM YOUR FATHER.
