Chapter 709 | The Medical Protocol

Chapter 709: 709 | The Medical Protocol

Mrs. Albrecht made a sound that might have been a laugh if a person capable of human emotion had made it. "What do you need."

"A spectral cross-reference against an unregistered source. The database returned a match to the distributor but not to the principal buyer. The buyer’s signature is not in the system."

"Which means the buyer is either unregistered or operating under false documentation."

"Or both."

"Send me the parameters. I will run a shadow query against the non-compliance archive."

The non-compliance archive held a record of every Aspect-bearer who had failed to register properly or had been struck from the database for falsification, along with everyone whose documents did not match what they could actually do. Accessing it was technically illegal. Mrs. Albrecht had been accessing it for Heinrich Lang since before Petra was born.

Petra typed the parameters and sent them through the secure connection.

"You will have results by six AM your time," Mrs. Albrecht said. "Is there anything else."

Petra looked at her ruined bed, at the pillowcase still damp with sweat and the emerald lace crumpled on the floor like evidence of a crime she had committed willingly, repeatedly, in a vocabulary that would have made her deportment instructor weep.

"I need a secondary analysis. Biological source material. Can you cross-reference genetic markers against the spectral database."

"What kind of biological source material."

Petra closed her eyes. Her face burned, and the room temperature was not the reason.

"Semen."

The silence on the line lasted exactly three seconds.

"Miss Lang."

"I have a sample. From a subject with documented anomalies in his Aspect registration. His file says late-manifesting Channeler, but his actual output exceeds registered parameters by a significant margin. I need to know whether his biological material carries genetic markers consistent with his official classification, or something else entirely."

Mrs. Albrecht’s breathing stayed even, and so did her voice. Something in the quality of the silence suggested that the woman who had run Heinrich Lang’s shadow operations for thirty years understood exactly what Petra was leaving out.

"You are asking me to run a genetic analysis on the biological material of a romantic partner without his knowledge or consent."

"I am asking you to run an analysis that may reveal information relevant to an active investigation into the systematic exploitation of vulnerable children."

"Those two statements are not mutually exclusive."

"No. They are not."

Another silence. Five seconds, this time.

"Send the sample through the secure courier network. Use the medical protocol. I will have preliminary results within forty-eight hours."

Petra exhaled. "Thank you, Mrs. Albrecht."

"Miss Lang." The woman’s voice carried something Petra had never heard in it before. It sounded close to acknowledgment. "Your father would be proud of you. He would never say it. But he would be."

The line went dead.

Petra sat at her desk, naked and sore, holding a phone that had just connected her to a shadow network she had known about for years and never once used for personal reasons. The line between family resources and her own life had always been clear. Lang Industries infrastructure served Lang Industries purposes, and the two overlapped only in emergencies.

This felt like an emergency.

She walked to the bathroom and took the small collection kit out of her toiletry cabinet, the one meant for situations involving biological evidence and crime scene protocols. It was standard hero-track equipment. Every Halloran student got one at orientation. Most of them gathered dust in drawers.

Petra’s had been used twice. Once in a training exercise with simulated biological hazards. Once at a charity gala, when a guest collapsed from what turned out to be Aspect-induced poisoning and Petra collected samples before the emergency responders arrived.

Tonight made three.

She went back to the bed and looked at the sheets, at the places where the evidence would be concentrated, and at the pillowcase that had absorbed sounds she had never made in front of another person.

The collection took eleven minutes.

She sealed the samples in the proper containers and labeled them with codes that would mean nothing to anyone who intercepted them and everything to Mrs. Albrecht’s laboratory technicians. She packed the containers in a temperature-controlled transport case and scheduled a pickup through the secure courier network for five forty-five AM, at the front desk, before Steele’s run.

Then she stood in the middle of her room, naked and exhausted, holding what was left of a man who had spent forty-seven minutes taking her apart and would never know what she had just done with the evidence.

The emerald barriers in the corner caught her eye. Six of them, stacked in the descending spiral she had built over twenty-two nights of waiting. They served no tactical purpose. They existed because her hands had needed something to do that was not calling Lukas Belmont.

She conjured a seventh and set it at the top of the spiral.

She had nothing left to work through tonight. Tonight was different, that was all. Twenty-two days of distance had ended with a business card and a please and a promise that he would make up for every single one. And somewhere in the Eastside, a five-year-old in a dinosaur hoodie was asleep in a bed his mother could barely afford, while men like Leonard Kask priced the bone spurs that would start shedding from his body in a few years.

Petra Lang put on fresh pajamas and climbed into sheets that did not smell like him, because she had stripped the bed and made it up with the spare set from her closet. She set her alarm for five-thirty and closed her eyes.

Sleep came faster than she expected.

At five thirty-two AM, her phone lit up with a message from an unsaved number that routed through three proxy servers before it reached her.

"Shadow query complete. No match in non-compliance archive. Buyer signature does not exist in any known database. Recommend expanding search to international registries. Preliminary biological analysis initiated. Stand by for Thursday delivery."