Chapter 5 - THE EMERGENCY PROTOCOL"Maya!" I screamed, lunging forward and throwing myself over my daughter’s convulsing body.
Her back arched off the mattress, her eyes rolling back as the high-pitched alarm from the heart monitor filled the tiny room with a deafening wail.
"What did you do?!" I roared at Vance, my hands frantically pressing against her shoulders to keep her from falling off the table. "What did you just activate?!"
Director Vance calmly slipped the satellite transmitter back into his pocket, his face completely devoid of human emotion. "Remote lockdown protocol, Mrs. Thorne. When an asset becomes compromised and the parent attempts armed intervention, the system automatically triggers a deep-tissue neural freeze. It paralyzes the host's nervous system to prevent extraction."
Robert went completely white. The Glock slipped from his trembling fingers, clattering loudly against the linoleum floor.
"No... no, no, no!" Robert screamed, dropping to his knees beside the exam table. He reached out to touch Maya’s foot, but pulled his hand back as if he had been burned. "Vance, turn it off! Turn it off right now! You said it wouldn't harm her!"
"Dr. Lawson! Do something!" I yelled, tears streaming down my face as I held my daughter's ice-cold hand.
Dr. Lawson was already moving with desperate speed. He grabbed the emergency crash cart from the corner, ripping open sterile packages and slamming a syringe of emergency epinephrine and neural-neutralizer into his hand.
"Hold her arms down!" Dr. Lawson barked, his voice fierce and professional. "If her heart rate drops any lower, we lose her!"
I planted my weight over Maya’s shoulders, whispering into her ear, "Stay with me, baby. Mom’s right here. Don't you dare leave me."
Dr. Lawson slammed the needle directly into Maya’s upper thigh.
For three agonizing seconds, nothing happened. The high-pitched flatline tone continued to ring in our ears, sharp and relentless. The digital clock on the wall blinked mockingly: 3:42 p.m.
Then, with a sudden, violent gasp, Maya’s back unarched. She sucked in a massive, ragged breath of air, her eyes snapping wide open as she began to vomit a dark, metallic fluid onto the paper sheet.
The heart monitor stuttered, skipped a beat, and then violently jumped back to life with a steady, racing rhythm: 130 beats per minute.
"She's back," Dr. Lawson breathed out, wiping a torrent of sweat from his forehead with the back of his sleeve. "She's stabilizing. But we have less than ten minutes before the system attempts a secondary lockdown cycle."
Robert was still on his knees on the floor, staring at his hands like they were covered in blood. "Cynthia... I'm so sorry. I didn't know... I swear to God, I didn't know they would activate it like that..."
"Shut your mouth, Robert," I said, my voice dead, flat, and colder than a block of ice. I stood up slowly from Maya’s bedside, wiping the sweat and tears from my face. I looked down at Robert, then across the room at Director Vance, who was calmly checking his wristwatch.
"You think you have all the power in this room," I said quietly, stepping away from the bed.
Vance looked up, raising a single eyebrow. "Excuse me, Mrs. Thorne? Your daughter is barely breathing, your husband is a disgraced felon, and you're in a private medical facility owned by my corporation. Exactly what power do you think you have?"
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"I have the one thing you didn't account for," I replied, pulling my phone out of my pocket—the spare phone I kept in my purse for emergencies, while the one Vance had confiscated had been Robert's. "While you were busy threatening us with your corporate lawyers and remote-control gadgets... my phone has been live-streaming every single word of this conversation to a secure cloud server shared with federal investigative journalists and the State Attorney General."
Director Vance’s face instantly drained of all color.
