Chapter 5 - The Confrontation
Genevieve burst into the shop, her face twisted in a terrifying blend of fury and panic.
“Get away from my daughter!” she screamed, her voice echoing off the corrugated walls.
The two security guards stepped forward, their hands resting on the holsters at their belts. Behind them stood Dr. Sterling—a smooth-faced man in his fifties with silver hair and gold-rimmed glasses, carrying an aluminum medical briefcase.
“Mother!” Piper shouted, stepping boldly in front of Boone. “Stop it! Look at me!”
Genevieve stopped dead in her tracks. Her eyes dropped to Piper’s legs.
Piper took three rapid, smooth steps toward her mother—no crutches, no walker, no awkward hip jerk. The movement was so natural it looked as if she had never spent eleven years in a wheelchair.
Genevieve blinked, her rage instantly faltering into bewilderment. “Piper... what did he do to you? What did he put on your leg?”
“He fixed it, Genevieve,” Derrick spoke up, stepping out from the shadows. “He fixed in three hours what your four-hundred-thousand-dollar Swiss doctors couldn't fix in a year.”
“Silence, Derrick!” Genevieve snapped, though her voice lacked its previous conviction. She turned to Dr. Sterling. “Doctor, examine her immediately.”
Dr. Sterling rushed forward, unrolling a tablet computer and opening his briefcase. “Miss Larkin, please sit down. Uncertified modifications to an AeroBio frame can cause catastrophic structural failure—”
“Touch me and I’ll file a battery charge against you, Dr. Sterling,” Piper said, her voice dropping into a cold, commanding tone that sounded uncannily like her mother’s—but tempered with absolute truth. “Look at the data on your tablet right now. Read the live telemetry from the brace sensors.”
Dr. Sterling hesitated, tapping his tablet screen.
As he read the live stream of data radiating from the brace’s bluetooth diagnostic chip, his face drained of color. His eyes widened behind his gold-framed glasses.
“The... the joint pressure,” Sterling stammered, his fingers trembling over the glass screen. “The lateral torque has dropped by eighty-two percent. The pelvic alignment is... it’s completely nominal.”
He looked up at Boone in utter shock. “How? What algorithm did you use to calibrate the servo response?”
“I didn't use an algorithm,” Boone said, stepping forward beside Piper. “I used a lathe. I replaced your defective, cheap, mass-produced pin with a spherical joint designed for a human body instead of a factory assembly line.”
Genevieve stared at Dr. Sterling. “What is he talking about, Sterling? What cheap pin?”
Boone reached into his pocket, pulled out the bent, scored steel pin he had removed from Piper’s brace, and tossed it onto the hood of the black SUV. It landed with a heavy, metallic clang.
“That’s the part AeroBio Systems put in your daughter’s leg, Mrs. Larkin,” Boone said firmly. “They spent fifty thousand dollars on carbon fiber wrapping to make it look futuristic for your press releases, and about twelve dollars on the internal load-bearing hardware. They knew it was defective. That’s why they made you sign a liability waiver preventing anyone else from opening the casing.”
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Genevieve looked at the ruined piece of metal, then at Dr. Sterling, who was staring at his shoes, unable to meet her eyes.
A terrible, terrifying silence fell over the garage.
