Chapter 9 - The Call from Room 412My fingers trembled slightly as I swiped to answer the video call.
The screen flickered to life, showing the interior of Room 412 at the municipal hospital. But the room didn't look the way it had hours earlier. The clinical calm was gone.
Two armed security guards were standing outside the open door. Inside, a team of men in hazardous-material containment suits—their badges bearing the corporate logo of Vanguard Bio-Research—were surrounding Lily's hospital bed.
Maya was backed against the opposite wall, sobbing hysterically, trying to shield her daughter with her own body.
"Get away from her!" Maya screamed, thrashing as one of the hazmat technicians grabbed her arms and pulled her away from the bed. "What are you doing to her? Her breathing is fine! The doctor said she was stable!"
"Step back, ma'am," a cold, automated voice echoed from inside the containment helmet of the lead technician. "Patient 412 has tested positive for primary vector integration under federal emergency health directive 88-B. She is no longer classified as a civilian patient. She is corporate quarantine property."
"Mr. Foster!" Maya screamed, her eyes locking onto the camera of the tablet one of the technicians had dropped on the floor. "Mr. Foster, please! They're taking her! They said her medical grant was revoked—they said she belongs to Vanguard now!"
On the other end of the line, in the Vermont study, Richard chuckled softly.
"You see, Daniel?" Richard whispered, his voice steady even with my hand still gripping his lapel. "You can call the marshals. You can raid the labs. You can destroy my accounts. But the asset is already in the system. The legal framework was signed into law under emergency pandemic protocols twelve years ago. Any child who receives the Phase-Three integration vector becomes property of the research sponsor in the event of an outbreak quarantine."
I looked down at the phone screen.
On the video feed, the technicians were lifting Lily—still unconscious, her chest rising and falling in steady, rhythmic breaths—onto a specialized containment stretcher.
Maya was screaming, fighting the guards with a ferocity that tore straight through my soul.
"Daniel," Richard whispered, placing his frail hand over mine where I held him against the wall. "You can't fight biology. And you certainly can't fight the empire you helped me build."
I looked from the phone screen back to my uncle’s cold, triumphant face.
Then, slowly, a grim, humorless smile spread across my own lips.
"You're right, Richard," I said softly. "I built this empire by understanding weakness."
I released my grip on his collar, stepped back, and hit speakerphone on my device.
"Frank," I said clearly.
"I'm here, Daniel," Frank’s voice boomed instantly through the study's high-end audio system. "The federal marshals are positioned outside the Vermont estate. And the tactical team just breached the Vanguard research facility in Boston."
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Richard’s face instantly drained of all color. His confident, untouchable veneer shattered in a single second. "What... what did you say?"
"You forgot one fundamental rule of corporate raiding, Uncle," I said, walking slowly toward the desk and picking up his discarded glass of scotch, swirling the amber liquid before tossing it into the fireplace. "Before you try to own the system... you always make sure you own the majority voting shares of the parent holding company."
