Chapter 135 - The Architect's Last Will
The medical team wheeled Clara’s gurney alongside the hyperbaric tank. She was awake now, her small body trembling beneath the white thermal sheets, her eyes wide with terror as she looked at the creature inside the glass.
"Mommy..." Clara whimpered, her gaze darting to me. "Mommy, who is that?"
"Don't look at her, Clara," I said, stepping forward, but the guard on my right slammed his forearm across my collarbone, pinning me against the steel bulkhead.
"She is not your mother, little one," Eleanor hissed through the speaker, her gaze locked on the child. "She is a thief. A broken vessel who stole thirty years of my life. But you... you are the ledger."
Commodore Hayes walked over to the central medical terminal, inserting a heavy titanium flash drive into the console. The bank of monitors overhead flickered, replacing Eleanor's vitals with a cascading stream of genomic sequences—billions of base pairs scrolling in green alphanumeric code.
"When your grandfather Arthur realized the federal regulators and the European central banks were moving to seize our sovereign accounts in the late nineties," Hayes said in a clinical, detached tone, "he didn't hide the wealth in gold bars or off-shore numbered accounts. Those can be frozen. Those can be audited. He commissioned a team of geneticists in Zurich to synthesize the cipher keys directly into the non-coding DNA of the family line."
The air in my chest turned to lead. I looked from the screen to Clara, whose small, frightened face was illuminated by the green glow of the monitors.
"The Sterling Trust," I whispered, the sickening realization dawning on me. "The four billion dollars... the bearer shares..."
"It’s not just a trust fund, Emily," Eleanor choked out, coughing against her ventilator tube, dark red fluid flecking the inside of the glass. "It is an encrypted private key. Clara’s bone marrow carries the biological sequence. Without her living tissue to verify the biometric handshake at the Geneva central repository, the entire estate is locked forever. She isn't just a donor to heal my failing organs. She is the password to everything we own."
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"And you were going to harvest her," I said, my voice dropping to a register so cold it surprised even me. "Like a crop."
"She was grown for this," Eleanor sneered, her eyes gleaming with manic conviction. "Just as you were grown to absorb Arthur’s rage so this family wouldn't tear itself apart. We all have our purpose, Emily. Yours was to bleed on Thanksgiving. Hers is to give me back my throne."
