17 doctors couldn’t cure the boy — until a little girl did it.

Alistair Ren looked at his son.

For thirty years, Alistair had lived in a world of balance sheets, regulatory approvals, and corporate strategy. He had viewed human beings as demographics, diseases as market opportunities, and mistakes as liabilities to be managed by legal teams.

But seeing his own son standing there, rescued from the brink of death by a child he had tried to bribe into silence, something inside the billionaire snapped.

"Eleanor," Alistair said, his tone turning ice-cold.

"Yes, Mr. Ren?" Eleanor Vance replied, already holding her phone. "I’m calling the crisis PR firm—"

"Hand me your phone," Alistair commanded.

He took the encrypted device from her hand, stepped over to the balcony rail, and dropped it into the three-story atrium below. It shattered on the marble floor far below.

"What are you doing?!" Eleanor gasped.

"Frankie," Alistair called to his lead private security guard. "Escort Miss Vance to the ground floor. Confiscate her badges, her laptop, and her keys. She is no longer employed by Apex Pharmaceuticals."

"Alistair! You can't do this!" Eleanor screamed as the heavy-set security guard grabbed her arm, escorting her toward the elevators. "The board will remove you by morning!"

"Let them try," Alistair said.

He turned to Dr. Silas Reed. "Silas. The Blackwood project... it wasn't a weapon. It was an agricultural growth enzyme meant to accelerate plant cell division in arid climates. Code-name Verdant-9. It mutated when it was exposed to industrial chemical runoff in the soil under the factory floor. It learned to feed on mammalian mucosal proteins."

"How do we kill it?" Reed demanded instantly. "Every second we stand here talking, ten more people are asphyxiating!"

"The enzyme requires a high pH environment to maintain its cellular integrity," Alistair revealed, his eyes burning with intense focus. "It thrives in the alkaline mucus of the upper throat. When we tested the neutralizing agent in the lab three years ago, we used a low-pH, hyper-saline acidic wash with copper sulfate."

"Copper sulfate?" Reed’s eyes narrowed. "That’s toxic in high doses!"

"Not in a six percent nebulized solution," Alistair countered. "If you aerosolize it and force the patient to inhale it through a fine mist, it breaks the protein anchors holding the cilia to the tracheal wall within forty seconds. It dissolves the parasite without harming the airway."

Reed looked at the billionaire for three long seconds, judging if the man was telling the truth.

"Do we have copper sulfate in the hospital pharmacy?" Reed asked, turning to a floor nurse.

"We have it in the compounding lab on Sub-Level 2," the nurse confirmed frantically. "We keep it for specialized dermatological washes!"

"Mix a six percent solution with hyper-saline!" Reed ordered. "Get every nebulizer, every ultrasonic mist machine, every asthma inhaler in this building down to the Emergency Room!"

"Wait," Marin said, stepping forward.

Dr. Reed stopped. "Marin, what is it?"

"The thing in his throat..." Marin said, pointing to Callum. "It was strong. When you tried to grab it, it fought back. If you mist them, won't it fight back before it dies?"

Alistair Ren looked at Marin, his eyes widening. "She’s right. The parasite reacts to chemical stress by contracting. If a patient is already weak, the sudden contraction could close their airway completely before the copper dissolves the anchors."

"Then we need something to paralyze it first," Reed realized. "The topical epinephrine I used on Callum! It froze the nerve responses in the creature's body!"

"Epinephrine first, then the copper mist," Marin said, her voice confident, echoing the instinct that had guided her all night.