2. The Bleeding Code

The injections began the next morning, and with them came the unraveling.

Evelyn learned quickly that the stimulation protocol was not designed for comfort. Each morning, a nurse named Linh—a wiry woman with exhausted eyes and hands that trembled slightly as she worked—administered a cocktail of hormones into Evelyn’s abdomen. The needle was thin, almost painless, but the aftermath was not. Within three days, Evelyn’s ovaries swelled until she could feel them, two heavy stones pressing against her pelvis. Her moods swung without warning: she wept at the sight of a dead moth on the windowsill, then raged at Marta for humming during meal protocol. The supplements left a metallic aftertaste that coated her tongue and killed her appetite, but she ate anyway because refusal was not permitted.

“Day five is always the worst,” Rose said on the fourth morning, watching Evelyn dry-heave into the shared bathroom’s metal sink. “Your body realizes it’s being hijacked. The trick is to stop thinking of it as your body. Think of it as a rental. A vehicle you’re borrowing until the contract ends.”

Evelyn gripped the sink’s edge and spat bile. “That’s what they want, isn’t it? For us to stop thinking of ourselves as people.”

“That’s exactly what they want.” Rose handed her a scrap of coarse paper towel. “The question is whether you let them succeed.”

The new nurse arrived on the sixth day, right on schedule.

Her name was Lina Oakes, and she was young—twenty-three, Evelyn later learned—with the kind of earnest, unguarded face that had never encountered systemic cruelty. She had trained at a respected nursing college in the Eldorian capital, graduated in the top third of her class, and answered the Veridian Genesis recruitment posting because it promised “competitive compensation, tropical location, and the opportunity to participate in cutting-edge reproductive medicine.”

The brochure had not mentioned the razor wire.

Rose intercepted Lina in the corridor between the medical wing and the staff quarters, timing her approach for the shift change when Captain Reyes was occupied with the morning security briefing. Evelyn watched from the common room window, her pulse loud in her ears, as Rose limped toward the new nurse with her most disarming smile.

“You’re the new medical staff,” Rose said, her voice carrying through the window’s thin glass. “Thank God. The last nurse quit without notice, and we’ve been short-staffed for weeks. I’m Rose—I’m one of the long-term carriers. Dr. Moreau asked me to show you the supply inventory system. The old nurse left it in chaos.”

Lina hesitated, her hand tightening on the strap of her duffel bag. “Dr. Moreau didn’t mention anything about a carrier showing me around.”

“He’s been in surgery all morning. Emergency retrieval—one of the girls ovulated early.” Rose’s lie was smooth as polished stone. “Look, I’ve been here three contracts. I know this facility better than most of the staff. If you want to wait for Dr. Moreau, that’s fine, but he won’t be available until evening, and the supply room won’t organize itself.”

Lina glanced down the empty corridor, then back at Rose’s open, helpful expression. The scar on Rose’s eyebrow caught her attention, but she didn’t ask about it. New staff rarely did.

“All right,” Lina said. “Show me the supply room.”

Rose led her past the server room door—third on the left, beyond the supply closet, exactly as Evelyn had noted—and into the supply room adjacent to it. For twenty minutes, she walked Lina through the inventory system, explaining the cataloguing codes with the practiced ease of someone who had memorized every shelf. Lina took notes on a small tablet, her initial wariness fading into professional focus.

When Rose finally excused herself and returned to the Nest, her smile was gone.

“She’s perfect,” Rose said, pulling Evelyn aside in the laundry alcove where the surveillance cameras had a blind spot. “She’s still got her induction credentials—they haven’t issued her biometric clearance yet. Tomorrow morning, during her orientation physical, she’ll need to provide a fingerprint scan for the system. The scan happens in the medical wing’s admin office, which is unlocked between seven and seven-thirty.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Because I’ve watched their onboarding process three times now.” Rose’s eyes were hard. “The first new nurse, I tried to befriend. She reported me to Captain Reyes for ‘fraternization.’ The second, I ignored. She quit after six weeks and never spoke to me. This time, I’m going to get what I need before she learns to be afraid of us.”

The plan was simple, which meant it was also dangerous. During the morning shift change, when Captain Reyes was occupied with perimeter checks and Dr. Moreau was reviewing overnight vitals in his office, Rose would create a diversion in the dining hall—a medical episode, convincing enough to draw staff attention but not severe enough to warrant sedation. While the medical team responded, Evelyn would slip into the admin office, access the fingerprint scanner before Lina’s biometric data was fully encrypted in the system, and copy her credentials onto the datacube.

“The scanner stores temporary prints for twenty-four hours before they’re uploaded to the main server,” Rose explained. “If we get there before the upload, Lina’s print will still be in the buffer. You copy it to the cube, and we’ll have medical staff access for at least a week before the system flags the anomaly.”

“And if we get caught?”

Rose met her eyes. “Then we find out what happened to the last woman who slept in your bunk.”

That night, Evelyn couldn’t sleep. She lay in her bunk, staring at the ceiling, listening to the distant hum of the compound’s generators and the closer sound of Anya’s whispered, wordless repetition. The datacube was hidden in the hem of her shift, a small hard lump against her hip. She had sewn it in with thread from her kit, the stitches tight and invisible.

Beside her, Marta was dreaming—Evelyn could tell by the way her fingers twitched, grasping at phantoms. Saanvi had cried herself to sleep again, her face still damp. And Rose lay utterly still, her breathing so controlled that Evelyn wondered if she ever truly slept at all.

“Rose,” Evelyn whispered.

“What?”

“The woman who slept here before me. Do you know what happened to her?”

A long pause. Then Rose’s voice, stripped of its usual armor: “Her name was Claire. She was a teacher from the northern provinces. Her daughter needed a heart surgery that provincial insurance wouldn’t cover. She took the contract thinking it would be simple—one pregnancy, one payment, then home. But she started asking questions. She found something in the medical records—something about the genetic profiles of the babies. She wouldn’t tell me what it was. She said she needed more proof.”

“And then?”

“And then one morning she didn’t come to breakfast. Dr. Moreau said she’d been transferred to a mainland facility for ‘specialized care.’ We never saw her again. Two days later, a new girl was sleeping in her bunk, and the staff acted like Claire had never existed.”

Evelyn pressed her palm against the datacube, feeling its warmth through the fabric. “What do you think she found?”

“I think she found out who the babies really belong to.” Rose’s voice dropped so low that Evelyn had to strain to hear it. “Veridian Genesis tells us we’re carrying children for ‘deserving families.’ Wealthy couples who can’t conceive. But I’ve been tracking the birth records for two years, and the numbers don’t add up. They’re transferring more embryos than they’re reporting. And the babies that leave this island—they don’t go to families. They go to corporations.”

Evelyn’s blood ran cold. “What do you mean, corporations?”

“I mean patents. Genetic patents. Veridian Genesis isn’t just a surrogacy agency. It’s a biotech firm. And we’re not carrying children. We’re carrying intellectual property.”

The words hung in the darkness like a verdict. Evelyn thought about the silver bracelet on her wrist, monitoring her vitals, tracking her cycles, transmitting data to a server she couldn’t access. She thought about the supplements she swallowed every day, the cocktail of drugs that she had never been allowed to question. She thought about Anya, implanted without consent, her body commandeered for a purpose no one had explained.

“Tomorrow,” Evelyn said. “We get the credentials. Then we find out what’s on this cube.”

Morning came gray and humid, the sky pressing down on Aurelia Cay like a lid. Evelyn reported to the medical wing for her sixth injection, her heart hammering so hard she was certain the monitors would detect it. Nurse Linh administered the shot with her usual mechanical efficiency, her eyes never meeting Evelyn’s, her hands steady despite their tremor.

“You’re responding well to the protocol,” Linh said, reading from a tablet. “Follicle count is at fourteen. Dr. Moreau will want to schedule retrieval in three to four days.”

Three to four days. After retrieval came fertilization, then transfer. After transfer came pregnancy—or the demand for another cycle. Evelyn calculated the timeline in her head and felt the walls closing in.

At seven-fifteen, she was back in the Nest, standing at the common room window with Rose. They watched the medical wing through the glass, waiting for the signal.

“Lina’s orientation physical is at seven-thirty,” Rose murmured. “She’ll be in the admin office before that, logging her credentials. Captain Reyes does her perimeter check at seven twenty-five, and she always starts at the east fence. That gives us a seven-minute window.”

“Seven minutes. That’s not much.”

“It’s enough. It has to be.”

At precisely seven-twenty, Rose walked into the dining hall, where the other carriers were finishing their morning supplements under the supervision of a single security guard. Evelyn watched through the doorway as Rose approached the guard, her limp more pronounced than usual, her hand pressed to her chest.

“I need medical,” Rose said, her voice carrying the perfect note of controlled panic. “My heart—there’s something wrong with my heart.”

The guard hesitated. Rose’s face was pale—Evelyn didn’t know how she had managed that, whether it was a trick of breathing or sheer force of will—and her breathing had gone shallow and rapid.

“I’ll call the medical wing,” the guard said.

“There’s no time. Please—I can’t breathe—”

Rose collapsed. It was a controlled fall, her body crumpling in a way that looked terrifyingly real. Her head struck the floor with a sound that made several carriers cry out. The guard dropped to her knees beside Rose, shouting into her radio for medical assistance.

Evelyn didn’t wait. She was already moving, slipping out of the Nest through the laundry alcove and into the covered walkway that led to the medical wing. The corridor was empty—Dr. Moreau’s office door was closed, and the sounds of the morning shift change echoed from the opposite direction.

The admin office was unlocked, just as Rose had promised.

Evelyn slipped inside and closed the door behind her. The room was small and windowless, dominated by a metal desk and a terminal that glowed with the Veridian Genesis logo. Beside the terminal, the fingerprint scanner sat on its charging dock—a sleek black pad with a single blinking light.

She crossed the room in three steps and picked up the scanner. It was lighter than she expected, warm from recent use. Lina’s temporary print would still be in the buffer, unencrypted, waiting for upload.

Evelyn pulled the datacube from her shift, her fingers trembling as she connected it to the scanner’s data port. The cube’s small screen flickered to life, displaying a string of code she couldn’t read. She navigated the scanner’s menu by instinct, finding the temporary storage folder, selecting the most recent file—

Footsteps in the corridor.

Evelyn froze. The footsteps grew louder, then paused directly outside the admin office door. A shadow fell across the gap beneath the door—someone standing, waiting, perhaps listening.

She held her breath. The datacube’s screen showed a progress bar: 47% complete.

The doorknob rattled.

“Hello?” A voice—female, unfamiliar. “Is someone in there?”

Evelyn didn’t move. The progress bar reached 62%.

The doorknob rattled again, harder this time. “This is a restricted area. If you’re authorized, identify yourself.”

72%.

The footsteps retreated. Evelyn heard a radio crackle, a voice requesting security backup. She had maybe two minutes before Captain Reyes arrived.

88%.

The datacube beeped softly: TRANSFER COMPLETE.

Evelyn yanked the cube free, shoved it into her shift, and returned the scanner to its dock. She was at the door when she heard the distinctive heavy tread of Captain Reyes’s boots approaching from the east corridor.

She couldn’t go back the way she had come.

Evelyn scanned the room, her mind racing. The admin office had a second door—a supply closet, she had noticed on her first visit. She ducked inside just as the main door swung open.

Through the slatted closet door, she watched Captain Reyes enter the room, her hand resting on her stun baton. The security chief scanned the office with cold, methodical eyes, checking the desk, the terminal, the scanner.

“No one here,” Reyes said into her radio. “False alarm. But run a check on all carrier bracelets—I want location data for every woman on this compound in the last ten minutes.”

Evelyn pressed herself against the back of the supply closet, surrounded by boxes of syringes and sealed packets of supplements. Her bracelet pulsed against her wrist, warm and insistent, and she knew with sick certainty that it was transmitting her location right now, that somewhere in the compound, a screen was displaying a blinking dot that should not have been in the admin office.

She waited until Captain Reyes’s footsteps faded, then counted to sixty before slipping out of the closet and back into the corridor. She walked quickly but not hurriedly, her face arranged into the blank expression she had practiced in the mirror, the look of a woman who had been nowhere and seen nothing.

The dining hall was still in chaos when she returned. Medical staff had arrived—Nurse Linh was kneeling beside Rose, checking her pulse, while a second nurse prepared an injector. Rose was conscious now, her breathing still labored, her face still pale.

“She’s stabilizing,” Linh announced. “Probably a reaction to the new supplement formulation. I’ll want to monitor her in the medical wing for a few hours.”

Evelyn caught Rose’s eye across the room. Rose’s expression didn’t change, but her hand moved slightly—a thumbs-up, pressed against her thigh where no one else could see.

It was done.

That evening, after Rose had been returned to the Nest with a clean bill of health and a warning to report any further symptoms immediately, the two women huddled in the laundry alcove. The datacube was warm in Evelyn’s palm, its small screen glowing.

“Did you look at what was on it?” Rose asked.

“Not yet. I wanted to wait for you.”

Evelyn navigated to the cube’s file directory. There were dozens of files—medical records, video logs, a series of encrypted documents with names she didn’t recognize. But one file stood out: it was labeled simply, in the kind of desperate shorthand that suggested it had been typed in a hurry.

CLAIRE_FINAL.

“It’s from Claire,” Evelyn breathed. “The woman who slept in my bunk.”

She opened the file.

The document was a medical report, formatted in the dense, clinical language of a pathology lab. But as Evelyn read, the clinical language fell away, and what remained was a horror so stark that she had to read it twice to believe it.

The report detailed the genetic analysis of a fetus—Claire’s fetus—that had been terminated at twenty-two weeks. The reason for termination was listed not as a medical emergency, but as “client specification non-compliance.” The fetus, the report explained, had developed with brown eyes. The client had specified blue.

And beneath that, in smaller text, a notation that made Evelyn’s vision blur:

“Tissue sample retained for proprietary stem cell line extraction. Patent application filed under Veridian Genesis Biotech Subsidiary 4. Specimen designated VG-2247-B.”

“They’re not just terminating pregnancies they don’t want,” Evelyn whispered. “They’re harvesting them.”

Rose’s face had gone gray. “Keep reading.”

Evelyn scrolled down. The document continued—page after page of similar reports, dozens of terminations, dozens of patent filings, a catalog of human tissue reduced to intellectual property. And at the very end of the file, a single line that Claire had typed in a font larger than the rest, as if she had been running out of time:

“The babies that leave the island are the successful products. The ones that don’t leave are the inventory.”

The datacube’s screen flickered and went dark.

In the silence that followed, Evelyn became aware of a sound she had not noticed before—a high, thin keening that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. It took her a moment to realize it was coming from her own throat.

“We need to get this off the island,” Rose said. Her voice was steady, but her hands were shaking. “We need to get this to someone who can do something.”

“Who?” Evelyn demanded. “The Eldorian Health Authority didn’t believe you. The journalists didn’t believe you. Who’s going to believe this?”

“There’s a woman.” Rose’s eyes had gone distant, focused on something Evelyn couldn’t see. “A journalist. She contacted me after my first attempt to go public. She said she believed me, but she needed more evidence. At the time, I didn’t have any. Now...”

“Can you reach her?”

“Not from here. All communications are monitored. But she told me she’d be watching. She told me she’d find a way.” Rose gripped Evelyn’s arm. “Her name is Isla Vance. She works for the Eldorian Free Press. If we can get this datacube to her—”

The door to the laundry alcove slammed open.

Captain Reyes stood in the doorway, her stun baton drawn, her face expressionless. Behind her, two security guards flanked the corridor, their hands resting on their weapons.

“Carrier Kincaid,” Reyes said. “You’re wanted in the medical wing. Dr. Moreau has some questions about your bracelet’s location data this morning.”

Evelyn’s hand closed around the datacube, pressing it into her palm. She could feel Rose tense beside her, calculating odds, measuring distances.

“Don’t,” Evelyn murmured, so quietly that only Rose could hear. “Not yet. We need the cube to survive.”

Reyes stepped forward and closed her hand around Evelyn’s wrist—the wrist with the bracelet, which pulsed once, obediently, at the security chief’s touch.

“This way,” Reyes said. “Dr. Moreau doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

As Evelyn was led from the alcove, she caught one last glimpse of Rose’s face—pale, furious, and utterly helpless. Then the door closed between them, and the corridor stretched ahead, leading toward the medical wing where Dr. Arnaud Moreau was waiting with his gentle voice and his cold eyes and his questions that no one ever answered.

The datacube burned against Evelyn’s palm like a coal.