“He’s not breathing. Somebody help him!”
The panicked scream tore through the hush lobby of the Holloway Institute. It was a place built on silence and control. A temple of glass and steel, where the only sounds were the soft chime of elevators and the whisper of expensive shoes on polished marble. But this sound, raw and jagged with terror, shattered the calm completely.
Leona Crestwood, a CEO who could command boardrooms with a single glance, was on her knees. Her iron-willed composure, the armor she wore every day, had cracked. Her son Finn, a small, pale boy of eight, was gasping, his chest heaving with ragged, useless breaths. His face was turning a terrifying shade of blue.
Standing a few feet away, Dr. Aerys Holloway was frozen. As the institute’s star scientist, her mind cycled through diagnoses: anaphylaxis, acute asthmatic crisis, but her body wouldn’t move. She was paralyzed by the sheer primal fear of watching a child suffocate. The child of the woman who held her entire career in her perfectly manicured hands.
Security guards were rushing forward, fumbling with radios. Their training was meant for intruders, not this. A call had gone out to the on-site medical team, but they were a world away, three floors up.
It was Owen Ledger, the janitor, polishing the floor by the west entrance, who moved first. He dropped his buffer, its hum dying with a soft whine. He didn’t run. He moved with a fluid certainty that seemed to slow time. He slid across the marble floor on his knees, his movements economical and precise.
“Ma’am, I need you to give me some space,” he said, his voice low and steady, cutting through Leona’s frantic cries.
Leona looked up, her eyes wild. “Who are you? Get a doctor.”
Owen didn’t answer. His focus was entirely on Finn. “Finn, can you hear me? I’m Owen. I’m going to help you.”
He gently placed one hand on the boy’s trembling shoulder and the other on his back, tilting him forward slightly. “That’s it. Lean on me.” His voice was a calm rhythm in a world of chaos.
Aris finally unfroze, stepping forward. “What are you doing? You can’t move him. His airway is closing.”
Owen said without looking at her. He spotted a half-eaten protein bar with peanuts listed in the ingredients on the floor. “It’s an allergic reaction. His emergency inhaler. Does he have one?”
Leona, jolted by the question, fumbled with Finn’s bag. “Yes, here.” She thrust a small blue albuterol inhaler into his hand.
Owen took it, his hand steady. He popped the cap, inserted it into a spacer he pulled from another pocket of the bag, and shook it with a practiced snap of the wrist. “Okay, Finn, I know this is scary. We’re going to breathe together. Breathe out as much as you can. Good boy.”
He waited a beat, his timing perfect. Then he pressed the canister and held the spacer to Finn’s lips. “Slow breath in. Slow, slow, slow. Hold it. 1, 2, 3, 4. Good. Let it out.”
He repeated the process, his movements a seamless ballet of practiced care. He didn’t look like a janitor. He looked like someone who had done this a hundred times before.
The wail of a siren grew louder, and the institute’s medical team finally burst through the doors. But by the time they reached them, the worst had passed. The terrifying blue tint was receding from Finn’s lips, replaced by a pale pink. His ragged gasps were settling into shaky, deeper breaths. He was crying now, quiet, exhausted sobs, his hands clutching the front of Owen’s gray uniform.
A paramedic knelt beside them. “What happened?”
“Anaphylactic response. Secondary asthma attack,” Owen reported, his voice flat, professional. “Administered two puffs of albuterol via spacer. Vitals are stabilizing.”
He gently unwrapped Finn’s fingers from his shirt and eased back, melting into the background. As the medical professionals took over, he became invisible again. He picked up his buffer, his shoulders slumping slightly, as if the energy that had surged through him had now vanished.
Leona stood slowly, her composure returning like a mask, but her eyes were fixed on the janitor. She watched him walk away, the soft squeak of his work boots echoing on the floor.
“Mom,” Finn’s voice was a weak whisper from the gurney.
Leona rushed to his side. “I’m here, baby. You’re going to be okay.”
“The quiet man,” Finn murmured. “He told me a story about a star.”
Leona looked over her shoulder, but Owen was already gone. She looked at her head of security, who had been standing by uselessly. Her voice was cold steel. “Find out who that was,” she commanded. “I want everything about him. His name, his history, everything on my desk in an hour.”
The guard nodded. “His name is Owen Ledger, ma’am. He’s on the night crew.”
“I don’t care what crew he’s on,” Leona snapped. “A man like that doesn’t just mop floors. Find out what he’s hiding.”
The smell of antiseptic still clung to Owen’s clothes as he pushed open the door to his small apartment. It was a scent he knew better than his own. He slipped off his worn work boots and moved through the dim living room. The place was spotless. Not just clean, but sterile. Not a home, but a safe zone.
In the corner, under the soft glow of a nightlight, Poppy was asleep. She was curled on her side in a specialized bed, a thin tube tracing a path from a quietly humming machine to the back of her small hand. Her breathing was shallow.
Owen knelt beside her, his large calloused hand gently brushing a stray piece of hair from her forehead. Her skin was almost translucent. “Hey, sweet pea,” he whispered, his voice thick with an emotion he never showed the world. “Daddy’s home.”
Poppy stirred, her eyelids fluttering open. They were large hazel eyes full of a light that defied the frailty of her body. “Did you clean the stars tonight?” she murmured.
Owen managed a small smile. It was their nightly ritual. He worked at the Holloway Institute, a gleaming glass tower. To Poppy, it was where the stars were kept. And her father’s job was to polish them until they shone.
“I did,” he said softly. “Polished every single one.”
She smiled. “Tell me a story.”
He settled into the worn armchair beside her bed and began to tell her about a clumsy comet and a brave little star. He told this story a dozen times, but he told it like it was the first, his voice weaving a world of safety and magic. Tonight though, the images in his head weren’t of comets and stars. They were of a small boy with a blue face and the terrifyingly familiar weight of a life held in his hands.
For ten minutes, he hadn’t been Owen Ledger, the janitor. He had been someone else, someone he had buried a long time ago. The feeling left him hollow. He had sworn never to be that person again, but he had broken his own rule, and someone had noticed. Leona Crestwood’s eyes had bored into him, not with gratitude, but with a cold analytical curiosity that terrified him.
Meanwhile, fifteen floors up, Dr. Aerys Holloway stared at a computer monitor. The lobby incident had left her rattled. She felt a sting of shame at her own paralysis, followed by annoyance. The janitor. He had moved with an assurance she, a doctor of immunology, had lacked.
“Anything?” She asked her lab assistant, Ben.
He shook his head. “The results on batch seven are the same, Doctor. The cell cultures aren’t binding. It’s like the control group is contaminated again.”
Aris ran a hand through her hair. This was the third batch in two weeks to fail. Her project, a revolutionary gene therapy, was stalling, and Leona Crestwood was not a patient woman. An email she’d sent an hour after the lobby incident was still burning on Aerys’s screen. Subject: Delays.
Dr. Holloway, today’s events, unfortunate. Let’s not have any similar surprises with my investment. The board requires a progress report by Friday. I expect significant positive data. Don’t disappoint me.
Era slammed her laptop shut. “Run it again, Ben. Triple-check everything. Someone is getting sloppy.”
In her penthouse, Leona Crestwood sat by her son’s bedside. The report from her head of security lay on the nightstand. She picked it up. Subject: Owen Ledger, age 38.
Employment history: custodial services, 5 years. Warehouse logistics, 2 years. Various temporary labor, 3 years.
Education: Northgate High School diploma.
Next of kin: Poppy Ledger, daughter, age seven.
Criminal record: none.
A portrait of a completely unremarkable life. A working-class single father. It made no sense. The man she had seen on the floor was not a high school graduate who pushes a mop. He was something more.
“There’s a gap,” her security chief had told her. “Almost four years between his last temp job and when he started in logistics. No employment records, no credit history. It’s like he fell off the grid.”
Leona stared at the report. Owen Ledger. She didn’t know what he was hiding, but she would find out.
Back in his apartment, Owen sat at the kitchen table. He pulled a worn folder from a locked drawer. Inside were medical bills, insurance denials, and a single brochure for the Holloway Institute’s Department of Immunological Research. He opened it, his eyes falling on a picture of Dr. Aerys Holloway. Below it, he had circled a line in red ink: Phase 3 trials for HVT074 are currently underway with unprecedented results in treating rare pediatric autoimmune disorders.
Poppy’s doctor had told him last week, “She has months, Owen. Maybe this trial, it’s her only shot.”
He closed his eyes, the weight of it all pressing down. His daughter’s only hope was locked away in a laboratory cleaned by his own hands, run by a woman who saw him as nothing and funded by another who now saw him as a puzzle to be solved. And he knew with chilling certainty that if they discovered who he really was, they would never let him or his daughter anywhere near it.
The next night, the air in the Holloway Institute felt different. Owen could feel it in the way the security guards watched him, their gazes lingering. He was no longer invisible. He kept his head down, focusing on the rhythmic swoosh of his mop, the simple work that had been his shield for years.
He was cleaning the glass partition outside the main cryos storage unit when the executive elevator chimed. Leona Crestwood stepped out. She wore tailored black trousers and a simple cashmere sweater. It was a calculated disarming. She was not alone. Holding her hand was Finn.
“Mr. Ledger.” Leona’s voice was smooth, measured.
Owen stopped mopping and turned slowly.
“Ma’am, Finn has something he wanted to give you,” she said, nudging the boy forward.
Finn shuffled his feet and held out a folded piece of construction paper. Owen wiped his hands before taking it. He unfolded it. It was a child’s drawing of two stick figures. One was small and blue. The other was tall and held a bright yellow star.
“That’s you,” Finn whispered, pointing. “You’re the star polisher.”
Owen felt a lump form in his throat. He crouched to Finn’s level. “This is the best drawing I’ve ever seen, Finn. I’m going to put it in a very special place.”
Finn finally looked up, a small, hesitant smile on his face. “Mommy said you were brave.”
Leona’s expression was unreadable. “I came to thank you properly, Mr. Ledger. My son, what you did was remarkable.”
“I’ve arranged for a substantial bonus to be added to your next paycheck.”
Owen stood carefully, folding the drawing into his pocket. “That isn’t necessary, ma’am. I just did what anyone would have done.”
“No,” Leona said, her eyes narrowing slightly. “Not just anyone could have done that. Where did you learn to handle a medical crisis with such efficiency?”
The question hung in the air, sharp and pointed. Owen could feel the trap. “First aid courses. The company requires them, and I watch a lot of medical shows on TV.”
It was a weak explanation, and they both knew it. Leona’s lips thinned. He had refused her reward and given her a lie. The file said he was a simple man. The man before her was anything but.
“I see.” She said, “Well, my offer stands. If there’s anything you need, my office is aware.”
It wasn’t an offer. It was a test. A man like him would eventually need something, and when he did, he would come to her, and she would get her answers. She took Finn’s hand. “Come, sweetheart.” As they walked away, Finn gave Owen a small wave.
Owen watched them go, his heart pounding. He had survived, but this was only the beginning. He was a mouse being circled by a hawk.
Later, the building settled into slumber. Owen was on the 17th floor. He was emptying the trash when a faint, high-pitched whine caught his ear, coming from Aerys Holloway’s main lab. It was a sound he recognized with a sickening jolt: a centrifugal freezer with a failing coolant pump.
He peered through the small glass window. The room was dark, save for the glow of monitors. The freezer had a small red light blinking on its control panel, a warning light, but someone had placed a piece of black electrical tape over it, rendering it nearly invisible.
Owen’s blood ran cold. That freezer held all of Aerys’s research samples. Poppy’s only hope. If the temperature rose, everything would be destroyed. Protocol was to call security. Security would call the on-call lab tech who would take 20 minutes to arrive. By then, it could be too late.
His mind screamed at him to walk away, be invisible, but his feet were already moving. He pulled a master key card from his belt. A low-level card, but a grateful security guard had upgraded his access a few months prior without logging it. Owen swiped the card. The lock clicked open. He slipped inside.
The digital display on the freezer was flashing an error code. He knew E07—secondary pump failure. He pulled off the front panel. A thin clear tube that fed coolant to the backup pump had been slightly disconnected. Not broken, deliberately loosened, just enough to create a slow cascading failure. This was sabotage.
He could fix it in 30 seconds, but he would leave a trace. He would be on surveillance. A janitor who knew how to service complex medical equipment. He would be exposed.
He thought of Poppy. He thought of Leona’s cold eyes. He couldn’t fix it, but he couldn’t walk away. He pulled a small notepad from his pocket and scribbled four words, his handwriting disguised and blocky. Check coolant pump two. Valve loose. He folded the paper and slipped it under Dr. Holloway’s keyboard. Then he slipped back out of the lab, closed the door, and vanished into the shadows, leaving the warning behind like a ticking bomb.
Aerys Holloway arrived at the lab just after dawn. Then she saw it. A small folded piece of paper on her keyboard. Her first reaction was irritation. She unfolded it. The four words written in stark, blocky letters were a command or a warning. Check coolant pump two. Valve loose.
She nearly tossed it, dismissing it as a prank, but something stopped her. It was too specific. With a sigh, she walked to the centrifugal freezer. Everything looked normal. The temperature was stable. Green lights blinked. She was about to turn away when her eyes caught a tiny glint on the control panel. A small piece of black electrical tape covered one of the secondary status lights.
Her heart skipped a beat. She peeled it off. Underneath, a single red light was blinking a steady silent alarm. Her breath hitched. She wrenched open the front panel. Following the lines, her eyes darted to the secondary coolant pump. And there it was, the feed tube hanging loose by a millimeter. A slow drip of coolant was pooling beneath it. The primary pump was holding the temperature for now, but it was burning itself out.
The realization hit her like a physical blow. The tape, the loosened valve. This wasn’t a mechanical failure. It was sabotage. Precise, patient, and designed to be catastrophic. And her contaminated samples. Had they been contaminated at all, or had the temperature fluctuated just enough to skew the results? Someone was trying to destroy her work from the inside.
She looked at the note. Whoever wrote this had just saved her project. But who? And why do it this way?
Later that morning, she was summoned to Leona Crestwood’s office. Leona sat behind a vast obsidian desk, her face impassive.
“Dr. Holloway,” Leona began. “I’ve reviewed your project’s lack of progress. Combined with the security lapses, the board is getting nervous. We are a business, not a charity.”
Aerys felt a flush of anger. “The research is sound. We’ve had some equipment malfunctions.”
“I’m not interested in excuses.” Leona cut in. “I’m interested in results. The board has approved an accelerated timeline. You have one month to produce a viable sample for preliminary human trials. One month, Aerys, or I’m pulling your funding.”
One month, it was impossible.
“Leona, that’s not enough time. The protocols…”
“Make it enough time,” Leona said, her voice a menacing whisper. “Or find a new sandbox to play in.”
Aerys walked out, the blood pounding in her ears. One month to save her life’s work while fighting a saboteur she couldn’t identify.
That afternoon, Owen sat in a small examination room, Poppy on his lap. Dr. Anna Chararma looked at the chart, her expression gentle but weary. “The immunosuppressants aren’t holding her anymore, Owen,” she said softly. “Her T-cell count is dropping again. The inflammation markers are the highest they’ve ever been.”
Owen felt the familiar cold dread. “So, what’s next? Increase the dosage?”
Chararma shook her head. “We’re already at the maximum safe level. It’s time to start talking about palliative options. Making her comfortable.”
The words hit him with the force of a blow. Palliative, comfortable. They were giving up.
“No,” Owen said, his voice raw. “There’s the trial. The HVT074 trial at the Holloway Institute.”
“Owen, we’ve been over this. The trial is closed. They aren’t accepting new patients, especially not for compassionate use.”
“Then we get them to make an exception,” Owen insisted.
Dr. Chararma gave him a sad smile. “You can’t fight a billion-dollar corporation with hope, Owen.”
He left the clinic with Poppy in his arms. He could feel her life slipping through his fingers. He had saved the research, but now the clock was ticking faster, and a saboteur, a ruthless CEO, and a wall of corporate indifference stood between his daughter and her last chance.
Back in her lab that night, Aris couldn’t shake the image of the note. Trusting no one, she bypassed security and pulled up the raw surveillance footage from the hallway. She fast-forwarded through hours of emptiness. Then at 3:14 a.m., a figure appeared, a man in a gray janitor’s uniform. He paused outside her door before swiping a card and slipping inside for no more than 90 seconds.
She couldn’t see his face clearly, but she could see his build, his gait. It was him, the janitor from the lobby. The idea was insane, impossible, but the evidence was right there. He left the note. A janitor? How could he possibly know what a loose valve on a secondary coolant pump was?
Aris leaned closer, her heart hammering. She zoomed in on the grainy footage, trying to get a clearer image of the man who polished the floors. The man who held a secret that could save her project or prove she was losing her mind. The grainy image was a ghost, a figure in gray, moving with a purpose that contradicted his uniform.
Aerys watched the clip a dozen times. Owen Ledger. It defied logic, but the evidence was irrefutable. He had been in her lab. He had left the note.
She didn’t wait. She took the elevator down to the 17th floor and found him at the end of the hall cleaning the baseboards.
“Mr. Ledger.”
Owen flinched. He straightened up slowly, his face a careful mask. “Dr. Holloway, you’re working late.”
“So are you,” Aris replied. She held up the folded paper. “Did you write this?”
Owen’s eyes flickered to the note. He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Doctor. I don’t know what that is.”
“Don’t lie to me,” Eric said, her voice gaining an edge of steel. “I have security footage of you entering my lab at 3:14 a.m. I found this note on my keyboard.”
Owen’s composure didn’t crack, but Era saw a flicker of deep fear in his eyes. “There must be a mistake,” he said quietly. “Sometimes we empty the biohazard bins.”
“The bins were empty,” Era shot back. “And they don’t teach you how to diagnose a pending failure in a cryo-freezer’s secondary coolant pump in janitorial training. I’m going to ask you again, who are you?”
He was trapped. The janitor persona was disintegrating.
“I’m the janitor,” he finally said, his voice raspy.
“No,” Aris insisted. “You’re not. What was it? An army medic? An engineer?”
Owen met her eyes, and the desperation she saw there startled her. It wasn’t the look of a man caught in a lie. It was a man watching his world crumble. “Does it matter?” he asked. “I saw something was wrong.”
“I couldn’t just walk away.”
“Why?” she pressed. “Why do you care about my research?”
“Because your work isn’t just about data and funding, Doctor.” The words burst out of him, raw. “It’s about people running out of time. There are kids counting on you to succeed. Your project is their last hope.”
The raw emotion silenced her. He was talking about someone. The pleading desperation in his eyes. It was the same look she saw on parents in clinical trial waiting rooms. A new variable entered her equation: emotive.
“Who are you trying to save, Mr. Ledger?” She asked softly.
Owen flinched. “I’m just asking you to be careful. Someone is trying to stop you. The valve. It was deliberate.”
He was deflecting, offering her a piece of himself, but only a piece. For now, it was enough. She had a saboteur in her lab and an impossible deadline. This strange janitor might be the only person she could trust.
“Okay, Ledger,” she said. “For now, I won’t ask any more questions. Your visit to my lab last night didn’t happen, but I need you to be my eyes and ears at night. You see things no one else does. If you notice anything out of place, you come directly to me. Understood?”
Owen looked at her, a flicker of disbelief and relief in his eyes. He gave a single sharp nod. “I understand.”
A fragile, unspoken alliance was formed. As Aerys walked away, her mind raced. She had more questions than answers. But she also had a new secret weapon. A ghost in the machine.
Miles away, Leona Crestwood’s phone buzzed. It was her head of security. “We found something in that four-year gap, Miss Crestwood,” the man’s voice said. “He wasn’t on any financial grid, but we cross-referenced hospital admission records. His daughter, Poppy Ledger, was a long-term patient at St. Michael’s Pediatric Hospital. Severe autoimmune deficiency.”
Leona felt a chill.
“And here’s the interesting part,” the security chief continued. “There was a nurse on that same pediatric ICU floor, a young guy, a prodigy. He resigned suddenly. The same week, an inquiry was launched into an equipment malfunction that resulted in a patient’s death. The hospital sealed the records, but I pulled his original employment file. His name was Owen Ledger.”
The words echoed in Leona’s penthouse. His name was Owen Ledger.
She lowered the phone, the pieces fitting together. A disgraced nurse, a patient death, a sick daughter. It wasn’t a puzzle anymore. It was a tragedy.
Her first instinct was to eliminate the threat. A man with a history like that was a liability. He had to be fired. But then the image of Finn gasping for air flashed in her mind. She saw Owen not as a liability, but as the only person who had known what to do, and he had a daughter, a little girl named Poppy. The mother in her wrestled with the CEO. Firing him would be easy, clean, but it would also be cruel and a waste. This man had a unique set of skills and a motive more powerful than any paycheck. A motive she could use.
Down on the 17th floor, Owen moved with a new purpose. His eyes weren’t on scuff marks. They were on people. He was a ghost with a mission. He noticed things. Dr. Coleman, Aerys’s rival from oncology, was in the immunology wing far too often. A new cleaning crew had been hired, and one of them seemed particularly clumsy near the data servers. He reported it all to Aerys in brief coded notes left in a hollowed-out book on a library cart. Coleman in lab 3 again. 11 PM. New cleaning crew. Man with scar avoids cameras.
Aerys, in turn, worked with a renewed, frantic energy. The one-month deadline felt like a declaration of war. She implemented new security protocols, trusting no one but the anonymous information from her ghost. A strange relationship was forming. He fed her information from the shadows, and she used it to protect the research that was his only hope.
Two nights later, Leona made her move. She found Owen wiping down the doors of the cryos storage unit. He tensed the moment he heard her elevator. He turned, his face telling her he knew this was coming.
“We need to talk, Mr. Ledger,” she said, holding a tablet. “St. Michael’s Pediatric Hospital, the ICU. You were a nurse there for 2 years, a very good one.”
Owen’s face went pale. The mop handle clattered to the floor.
“They called you a prodigy,” Leona continued, relentless, “until an incident with a ventilator. A seven-year-old boy died. The hospital claimed mechanical failure, but the inquiry focused on you. You resigned before they could fire you.”
He could barely breathe. This was his nightmare, standing before him in a $1,000 sweater.
“And your daughter,” Leona said, her voice softening a fraction. “Poppy, severe primary immunodeficiency.”
Owen finally found his voice, a broken whisper. “Please don’t.”
“Don’t what?” Leona asked. “Don’t expose the fact that I have a disgraced nurse with a dead child in his past working 30 feet from a lab conducting pediatric research?”
He squeezed his eyes shut. “It wasn’t my fault. The ventilator was faulty. I wrote it up three times. They buried the reports.”
“It doesn’t matter what I believe,” Leona said. “It only matters what it looks like, and right now it looks like a liability I cannot afford.”
Owen braced a hand against the wall. “So, you’re going to fire me?”
“That was my first thought,” Leona admitted. “But you saved my son’s life. That buys you one chance.”
She swiped the tablet to a new screen. “Dr. Holloway’s project is being sabotaged. My investment is at risk.”
Owen stared, confused.
“You’re in a unique position, Mr. Ledger. You’re invisible. You see everything,” Leona said. “I want you to find out who is trying to destroy this project. You will report everything directly to me, not to Dr. Holloway. To me.”
“You want me to be your spy?” Owen breathed.
“I want you to be a concerned employee,” Leona corrected smoothly, her voice dropped to a deadly whisper. “Your daughter needs Dr. Holloway’s trial to live. I’m the only one who can make that happen. I can sign off on a compassionate use exemption. I can save her life.” She paused. “Help me, Mr. Ledger. Find my saboteur, and I will save your daughter. Fail me, and this file about your past goes to every news outlet in the city, and your daughter will never get her chance.”
Owen felt like he was drowning. Leona’s words were anchors pulling him down. Spy, betrayal. The price for his daughter’s life was the last shred of his integrity. There was no choice. A father doesn’t get to have a conscience when his child is dying.
He picked up his mop, his hand shaking. “I’ll do it,” he said, his voice dead.
Leona gave a small, satisfied nod. “I’ve created a secure, anonymous email address for you. Send your reports there daily.”
She turned and walked away, leaving him alone with the wreckage of his life.
The next few days were a special kind of hell. Owen moved through his shift like a man haunted. Every conversation was a potential betrayal, every observation ammunition for a woman who would not hesitate to use it.
He sent his first report from a library computer. Subject: Night Observations. Dr. Coleman, oncology, in immunology lab again. Accessed imaging server. New contract cleaner, male, scar on left hand, spent unusual time near main server room.
He hit send, a wave of nausea washing over him. He was feeding Leona information he had already planned to give Aerys. He was walking a tightrope over a canyon.
An hour later, he saw Leona’s plainclothes security discreetly shadowing Dr. Coleman. The next night, the contract cleaning company was summarily dismissed. Leona was acting on his intelligence with terrifying speed. She was watching, and she was in control.
His interactions with Aerys became strained. He still left his notes, but they were shorter. He avoided her gaze. He was her ally and a spy set against her, and the dual roles were tearing him apart.
Aerys felt the shift. Her ghost was becoming distant. The pressure of Leona’s deadline was already crushing her. And now the one person she trusted felt like he was slipping away.
Then one night, she had a breakthrough. Acting on one of Owen’s earlier tips, Aerys cross-referenced the supply logs. Every contaminated batch had used filters from a specific crate. She isolated the remaining filters and reran her most critical experiment.
It worked. The cells bound to the therapy agent perfectly. The data that flooded her screen was a beautiful confirmation of her life’s work. It wasn’t a cure, but it was the key. She wanted to shout with joy, to find the quiet janitor who had made this possible. But she stopped. She didn’t know who she could trust.
For Owen, the news was a double-edged sword. He overheard the triumphant whispers. “She did it. The HVT074 therapy. It’s viable.”
A surge of pure hope shot through him. Poppy had a chance. But then came the cold dread. He had to report this to Leona.
He sat in the library again, typing out the report. Subject: Breakthrough. Dr. A. stabilized culture. Proof of concept successful. Use different cellular filters.
He sent it. The reply was a text message to the burner phone he’d been instructed to buy. Unknown number. Call me now.
He stepped into a soundproofed stairwell. She answered on the first ring.
“Mr. Ledger.” Leona’s voice was crisp. “Your report was promising. I want to know more.”
“That’s all I know,” Owen lied. “The filters were the key.”
“Don’t be naive.” She snapped. “A breakthrough isn’t just about filters. It’s about process. Dr. Holloway has been secretive about her binding agent technique. What did she do differently? The temperature gradients, the sequencing medium. I need details, Ledger. I’m acquiring…”
