Chapter 9 - The Truth Brought to Light
The canvas laundry bins in the sub-basement broke their fall, but the landing was hard. Lucy landed on top of Lily, coughing through the dust and dark air of the hospital's utility level.
"Lily? Are you okay?" Lucy whispered, cradling her sister's head.
"My chest hurts... but I'm okay," Lily whimpered. "Lucy... where are Mom and Dad?"
"They're fighting for us," Lucy said, her voice dropping into a tone of quiet, fierce determination that belied her fifteen years. "And we are going to fight too."
Using the flashlight on a fallen maintenance worker's phone she found on a desk, Lucy led her sister through the labyrinthine boiler rooms of Mercy General. She knew the layout of the lower levels—she had spent days looking at the hospital escape plans on the walls while recovering.
Ten minutes later, they burst through the emergency fire exit into the rainy alleyway behind the hospital, where three police cruisers with flashing red-and-blue lights were pulling up, led by Daniel Harper himself, who had escaped his holding room during the blackout to find his daughters.
"Lucy! Lily!" Daniel screamed, throwing himself onto the wet pavement and pulling both girls into a crushing embrace. "Oh God... oh God, you're safe!"
"Dad! Mom is still upstairs!" Lucy yelled, pulling back from his chest. "There were men with guns!"
"The SWAT team is already inside!" Detective Miller shouted, running out of the alley door with her weapon still raised. "We secured Rachel! She's bruised, but she’s alive!"
Behind them, FBI tactical vans swarmed the hospital perimeter. Julian Thorne was arrested twenty minutes later near the hospital’s helipad, caught red-handed with encrypted files containing the illegal gene-editing data he had sought to destroy.
With Thorne's arrest, the dark cloud that had hung over the Harper family for fifteen years finally exploded into the public eye.
The story hit international news headlines by noon: "THE GHOST TWINS: HOW AN ILLEGAL BIOTECH EXPERIMENT CREATED A DECADE-LONG FAMILY TRAGEDY."
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The federal government was forced to launch a massive congressional investigation into Thorne’s pharmaceutical firm. The threats against the Harper family were officially erased.
The monsters were finally in cages.
