Chapter 44 - The Glass Incubator
Before Weiss could touch the radio, I launched myself out of the Maybach, slamming my entire body weight into his chest.
We crashed into the polished tile floor with a sickening crunch. I drove the muzzle of the 9mm directly under his chin, pinning his head against the concrete before the two tactical guards could even raise their rifles.
"Tell them to drop the weapons, or your brains will decorate this garage floor before their safeties click off!" I roared, my thumb pulling back the hammer with a sharp, mechanical click.
Weiss gasped, his eyes bulging behind his cracked spectacles as the steel barrel bit into his trachea. "Stand down! Stand down! *Waffen fallen lassen!*"
The two guards froze, their rifles hesitating at low ready.
Khloe stepped out of the Maybach, her face cold as stone, holding Nathan against her chest. Isabella followed, brandishing Anthony's satellite phone with the emergency override screen flashing.
"Disarm them, Isabella," Khloe commanded quietly.
Isabella moved with surprising speed, kicking the guards' rifles away across the slick floor and tossing their sidearms into the backseat of the limousine.
"Sub-Level 2," I hissed into Weiss’s ear, hauling him up by the collar of his expensive lab coat until he was on his tiptoes, choking for air. "Keycard. Now."
Weiss trembled, reaching into his pocket with two fingers and pulling out a heavy platinum access badge. "You don't understand what you're doing, Reed. The extraction protocol has already initiated phase one. If you disrupt the atmospheric isolation in the nursery, the infant's lungs will collapse!"
"You touch that elevator button, or I’ll collapse your skull right here!" I shoved him forward into the private airlock.
The elevator doors slid shut, sealing us in a capsule of brushed steel and glass. The elevator dropped smoothly, passing through reinforced concrete bulkheads until it chimed softly: *SUB-LEVEL 2: ISOLATION BIOLOGY.*
The doors parted.
The corridor was completely silent, bathed in soft, pale blue ultraviolet light. The air smelled of ozone, liquid nitrogen, and sterile alcohol. At the far end of the hallway, behind a massive wall of double-paned ballistic glass, stood the central neonatal chamber.
Inside, surrounded by four humming life-support consoles, sat a single, glowing glass incubator.
Khloe gasped.
Through the transparent acrylic of the pod, connected to half a dozen microscopic monitoring leads and a tiny nasal cannula, lay a tiny, perfect baby girl. Her skin was pink, her delicate chest rising and falling with tiny, rhythmic breaths, a small tuff of dark brown hair visible beneath a white cotton cap.
She was the spitting image of Nathan.
"My baby," Khloe wept, breaking into a dead sprint down the hallway, slamming her palms against the heavy glass observation window. "My baby girl!"
Inside the incubator, as if sensing her mother’s voice vibrating through the glass, the tiny infant moved her fingers, kicking her legs against the sterile blanket.
"Open the door, Weiss!" I barked, shoving the gun harder into the doctor's neck. "Open it now!"
"I can't," Weiss whispered, his voice trembling with genuine terror. "I don't have the final clearance code. Only one person can release the environmental seal from inside the chamber."
A soft, mechanical hiss echoed through the ceiling speakers.
The lights inside the neonatal chamber brightened to full hospital daylight.
From the shadows behind the incubator, a motorized wheelchair rolled forward into the light.
Sitting in the chair, wrapped in an ivory silk robe with an oxygen tube running to her nostrils and an intravenous line taped to the back of her paper-thin hand, was Catherine Vance.
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She looked eighty years old, her face hollowed by disease, her gray hair pulled into an immaculate bun, but her eyes—ice-blue and completely devoid of human warmth—locked onto Khloe with terrifying, triumphant malice.
*"Hello, Khloe,"* Catherine’s voice purred through the intercom system. *"I see you brought me my other grandchild."*
