Chapter 4
The hum of the mainframe banks in Gideon's downtown archive sounded like a nest of trapped hornets. I sat on the edge of a steel-framed stool, balancing Owen against my shoulder while the cool night air from the vents stirred the loose tendrils of my hair. The black sequin dress felt entirely out of place among the blinking green indicators and towering stacks of magnetic tape, a relic from another life that felt three lifetimes away. Gideon stood before a dual-monitor console, his broad shoulders tensed inside the black suit jacket as his fingers flew across the mechanical keyboard with practiced speed. The glow of the command line reflected sharply in his dark eyes, throwing harsh shadows across the tattoos on his neck.
"The state health department firewall is tighter than it was three years ago," Gideon muttered, his voice rasped from hours of silent concentration. "They've routed their archival databases through a secondary proxy tied directly to Vance Medical."
"Can you bypass it?" I asked, keeping my voice low so as not to wake the infant resting against my chest. Owen's tiny hand occasionally twitched, his fingers brushing against the ornate silver bracelet on my wrist, tracing the teardrop scar with an instinctive familiarity that still made my throat tighten.
"I don't need to bypass it," Gideon replied, hitting the enter key with a sharp crack. "I'm using the root credentials I acquired when I funded their neonatal research wing four years ago. They never bothered to revoke my access level. They assumed I'd never look behind the curtain."
A data cascade rushed down the left-hand screen, thousands of lines of cryptographic hashes, birth registry numbers, and municipal health codes scrolling past too fast for the human eye to track. Gideon leaned in closer, his jaw set. "There. The November seventeenth batch. Look at the ledger logs for Ward Four."
I shifted Owen gently and leaned over the console, the faint scent of rain and old paper rising from the desk. My eyes scanned the scrolling text until a highlighted cluster of entries caught my breath. There it was: birth record 44-B, registered at 3:14 AM. Infant male. Mother's identity redacted under emergency minor protective custody seals. Status: Transferred to municipal palliative care following maternal expiration.
"That's a lie," I whispered, the words catching in my throat as the cold weight of the past decade crashed down on me. "I didn't expire. They locked me in a recovery room, drugged me until I couldn't lift my head, and when I woke up, they told me the baby had stopped breathing before they could even wrap him in a blanket."
Gideon didn't look at me, but his hand clenched into a fist on the desk, his knuckles turning white. "Vance didn't just falsify your death certificate in the municipal registry; she cross-registered the infant under an anonymous orphan trust funded by my own corporate philanthropy account. She used my money to buy the silence of the intake nurses, then handed the child to me six months later under the guise of an international humanitarian adoption."
Before I could answer, a shrill, piercing alarm tone echoed through the underground archive. The blinking green lights on the mainframe banks instantly snapped to a sharp, aggressive amber. Across the room, a red indicator lamp above the secure elevator doors began to rotate lazily, casting a bloody wash over the polished concrete floor.
"They found the port entry," Gideon said, his voice dropping an octave as he whipped his head around toward the heavy steel stairwell door. "My corporate legal team—the ones tied directly into Vance's network—must have set a tripwire on the server cluster."
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"How long do we have?" I demanded, sliding Owen securely into the crook of my arm and reaching down to grab the heavy silver tray we had brought from the ballroom, using it as an improvised shield against whatever was coming up those stairs.
"Seconds," Gideon said, yanking a thumb drive from the mainframe tower and slipping it into his pocket. "The private security detail assigned to this building answers to the board, not to me. We need to move now."
