5. The Suit

The research wing was not a wing at all. It was a bunker, buried beneath the mansion like a secret the island was trying to swallow.

Lena was marched down a stairwell she had never seen before, its walls rough-hewn stone that sweated moisture, its steps worn concave by years of use. The air grew colder as they descended, and the smell changed—the antiseptic sharpness of the Cradle giving way to something earthier, more organic, with an undertone of chemicals she could not name. Formaldehyde, maybe. Or something worse.

The guard did not speak. He walked behind her, his flashlight beam bobbing against the walls, and Lena counted the steps to keep her mind from spiraling. Thirty-seven steps. Then a landing. Then a corridor lit by bare bulbs in wire cages, their light a sickly yellow that made everything look jaundiced.

Doors lined the corridor. Unlike the doors in the Cradle, these had no colored stripes, no numbers, no markings at all. They were steel, heavy, each one fitted with a small observation window at eye level. As Lena passed, she could not stop herself from looking.

In the first room, a woman lay on a hospital bed, her body connected to machines by tubes and wires. Her eyes were open but unseeing, fixed on the ceiling. Her belly was swollen—not with pregnancy, Lena realized with a jolt of horror, but with something else. Something that moved beneath her skin in rippling waves, as if it were alive and restless and trying to get out.

In the second room, another woman sat in a chair, her head shaved, electrodes attached to her scalp. A monitor beside her displayed brain waves in jagged lines. She was rocking back and forth, her lips moving in a silent monologue that no one was listening to.

In the third room, the bed was empty, but the sheets were stained. Lena did not look closely enough to determine the color of the stains.

"Keep moving," the guard said.

They stopped at the fourth door. The guard unlocked it with a keycard, pushed it open, and gestured for Lena to enter.

The room was small—a cell, really, but cleaner than the detention block. There was a bed with fresh sheets, a sink, a toilet. A camera mounted in the corner, its red light blinking. And on the pillow, folded neatly, was a fresh robe. Not pale blue. This one was gray.

Lena turned to face the guard. "What is this place?"

"Processing. Someone will come for you soon."

The door closed. The lock clicked. Lena was alone.

She sat on the bed and waited. The camera watched her with its unblinking red eye. The fluorescent light buzzed overhead. Somewhere in the building, a machine beeped rhythmically, counting out a pulse that might have been a heartbeat or might have been a timer.

She thought about the women in the other rooms. The swollen belly. The shaved head. The empty bed with the stained sheets. She thought about the word *processing* and what it meant in a place where women were vessels and embryos were products and extraction was a cause of death.

She thought about Anya, somewhere in this same bunker, maybe in a room just like this one. She thought about Maeve and Rosalie and Sofia, still in the donor quarters above, carrying their edited embryos, waiting for a rescue that might never come.

And she thought about the satellite phone call. Eighteen seconds. Had it been enough? Had Elias Voss heard her? Had he believed her?

She had no answers. She had only the waiting.

Hours passed. The guard brought no food, no water. Lena's throat was dry, her stomach hollow. The embryo inside her—the parasite, she reminded herself—was a knot of cells she could not feel, a foreign presence she had not consented to carry. She pressed her hand against her lower belly and felt nothing but her own flesh.

She was still sitting there when the door opened and Dr. Lassiter walked in.

The psychiatrist looked different here, in the yellow light of the bunker. His glasses still magnified his eyes, but now those eyes seemed less wet, more reptilian. He carried a leather notebook—the same one from her psychological evaluation—and a pen that looked expensive and precise.

"Lena," he said, as if they were old friends. "I'm glad to see you're still in one piece. The detention wing can be hard on the constitution."

Lena did not stand. She did not speak.

Dr. Lassiter pulled a folding chair from the corner of the room and sat down across from her. He opened his notebook and clicked his pen. "I'd like to ask you a few questions."

"I've answered your questions before."

"These are different questions." He smiled, and it was the same bloodless expression she remembered. "The research program requires a different kind of evaluation. We need to understand your psychological profile in greater depth. Your resilience. Your pain threshold. Your capacity for attachment."

"My capacity for attachment?"

"To the embryo, for example. Some carriers develop emotional bonds with the fetuses they gestate. It's a natural hormonal response, but it can complicate the extraction process. We prefer to identify potential attachment risks early."

Lena stared at him. "You want to know if I'll miss it when you take it away."

"I want to know if you'll be a problem." Dr. Lassiter's pen hovered over the page. "Let me be candid with you, Lena. Your actions last night—the break-in to the administrative wing, the theft of the satellite phone, the call to the mainland—these are serious breaches of protocol. Under normal circumstances, you would be transferred to a high-security facility and we would never see you again."

He paused, letting the words sink in.

"But Victor Noe has taken an interest in you. He believes you have qualities that make you suitable for the research program. Resilience. Intelligence. A certain… defiance."

"Defiance," Lena repeated.

"The research program requires subjects who can withstand stress without breaking. The work we do here is delicate. The embryos we implant are genetically modified to express specific traits—enhanced cognitive function, disease resistance, longevity. But the modifications are unpredictable. The gestational process is physically demanding. Some carriers don't survive to term."

"How many?"

Dr. Lassiter's pen scratched across the page. "I'm sorry?"

"How many don't survive?"

He looked up at her, and for a moment, something flickered behind his magnified eyes. It might have been irritation. It might have been something else entirely.

"The survival rate is acceptable."

Lena felt a cold wave move through her body. Acceptable. Like she was a product. Like her life was a statistic in a ledger somewhere, balanced against the profit from a custom-designed baby.

"What happens to the ones who survive?" she asked. "After extraction. After they deliver the babies. What happens to them?"

"They are compensated and released."

"Like Clara was released?"

Dr. Lassiter stopped writing. He set his pen down slowly, deliberately, and looked at Lena with an expression that was no longer even pretending to be kind.

"Clara was a failed subject. She became violent during her third implantation and attempted to harm herself. The extraction was performed to salvage the genetic material she was carrying. Her death was an unfortunate complication, but the material was preserved."

"The material," Lena said. "You mean her eggs."

"I mean the embryos she was gestating." Dr. Lassiter stood up and closed his notebook. "You have a choice to make, Lena. You can cooperate with the research program, follow protocols, and in nine months you will be paid and released. Or you can refuse, and you will be processed for material extraction. Those are your options. There is no third door."

He walked to the door and knocked twice. The guard opened it from the outside.

"Think carefully," Dr. Lassiter said. "Victor will be down to speak with you tomorrow. I suggest you give him a positive answer."

The door closed. The lock clicked. Lena was alone again.

That night, she did not sleep. She lay on the bed with her eyes open, watching the camera's red light blink in the corner, and she thought about everything she had learned. The genetically modified embryos. The carriers who did not survive. The "material extraction" that was performed on women who refused to cooperate.

She thought about the other women in the bunker—the one with the swollen belly, the one with the shaved head, the ones in the rooms she had not seen. How many of them were still alive? How many had been "processed"?

And she thought about Anya. Anya, who had cut the fuel line. Anya, who had found the satellite phone. Anya, who had told Lena that the storm was their window.

The storm was over now. The window was closed. But Lena remembered the look on Victor Noe's face when she had told him about the lawyer—the flicker of uncertainty, the moment of doubt. He was afraid. And fear, Lena knew, was a weapon.

She sat up on the bed and looked around the room. The sink. The toilet. The camera. The door.

The sink had a pipe beneath it, a metal pipe that connected to the wall. Lena knelt beside it and ran her fingers along the joint where the pipe met the wall. The concrete was damp, softened by years of moisture. She pressed her thumbnail into it and felt it crumble.

She worked through the night, digging at the concrete with her fingernails, then with the edge of the metal bed frame, which she had managed to loosen with careful, quiet pressure. The camera watched her, but she kept her back to it, her body blocking the work of her hands. By the time the fluorescent light began to flicker—a sign, she hoped, that the generator was failing again—she had exposed a section of the pipe, a joint where the metal was thin and corroded.

She would need a tool. Something sharp, something heavy. She had neither.

But the guard would come in the morning. The guard always came. And when he did, Lena would be ready.

She slept for an hour, maybe two, curled on the bed with her hand wrapped around the loose piece of the bed frame. When the door opened, she was already awake.

It was not the guard.

It was Anya.

She stood in the doorway, her face bruised, her lip split, her gray robe torn at the shoulder. But her eyes were the same—hard, bright, unbroken.

"They moved me to the cell next to yours," Anya said. Her voice was hoarse, as if she had been screaming. "I picked the lock. Don't ask how. We have to move. Now."

Lena was already on her feet. "Where?"

"The security room. The typhoon took out the primary power grid, and the backup generator is failing. The electronic locks are cycling on and off. If we can get to the security room, we can disable the cameras, open the outer doors, and send a distress signal from the main communications console."

"How do you know all this?"

"Because I've been listening." Anya pointed to the ventilation grate above the sink. "The ducts carry sound, remember? The guards talk. They think the subjects are too broken to understand. But I understand everything."

They moved through the bunker like ghosts. The corridor was empty—the guards were upstairs, Lena guessed, dealing with the aftermath of the storm. The emergency lights flickered, casting long shadows that twisted and danced. Anya led the way, moving with the certainty of someone who had memorized every inch of the compound.

They climbed the stairs Lena had descended the day before. They passed the Cradle, its doors dark and silent. They passed the donor quarters, where Maeve and Rosalie and Sofia were still locked in their rooms, waiting for a rescue that had not come.

The security room was on the second floor, behind a door marked with a sign that said AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. The door was unlocked. The generator failure had done its work.

Inside, the room was a wall of monitors and control panels, their screens flickering with static. A single guard sat in a chair with his back to the door, his feet propped up on a console. He was asleep.

Anya moved first. She crossed the room in three silent strides, grabbed the guard's baton from his belt, and brought it down on the back of his head. He slumped forward without a sound.

"The console," Anya said, already turning to the monitors. "Help me find the communications panel."

Lena scanned the controls. Buttons, switches, screens filled with data she could not interpret. Then she saw it—a panel marked DISTRESS BEACON, its light still green.

She flipped the switch.

A siren began to wail, low and urgent, filling the compound with its sound.

"That will bring every guard on the island," Anya said. But she was smiling, a fierce, bloody smile. "Good. Let them come."

She opened a channel on the main communications console and began to speak, her voice steady and clear: "Mayday, mayday. This is New Eden Island, private facility operated by the Noe Foundation. We are prisoners here. Women are being held against their will, subjected to medical experimentation. We require immediate assistance. Repeat, we require immediate assistance."

She gave the coordinates—she had memorized them from the maintenance logs—and then she stepped back from the console and looked at Lena.

"Now we wait."

Footsteps in the corridor. Heavy, purposeful, growing closer. The guards were coming. Victor Noe was coming. But the distress signal was already in the air, bouncing from satellite to satellite, carrying their words to the outside world.

Lena picked up the guard's baton from where it had fallen. It was heavy in her hand, solid and real.

"They won't take us alive," Anya said.

"They won't take us at all."

The door burst open. Guards poured through, their weapons raised, their faces hard. Behind them, walking with the calm of a man who believed he could never lose, came Victor Noe.

He looked at Lena. He looked at the console. He looked at the blinking light of the distress beacon.

And for the first time, Lena saw genuine fear in his eyes.

"Shut it down," he said.

But it was too late. The signal was already sent. The world was already listening.

And in the distance, cutting through the noise of the dying storm, Lena heard a new sound: the thrum of helicopter rotors, growing closer by the second.

The island was about to become a courtroom. And Lena Grimes intended to testify.