They call it a suite.
That’s the lie.
Marble floors. Silk curtains. A king-sized bed facing floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over Los Angeles like the city exists for my comfort. There’s a vase of white orchids that never wilt and a scent—clean, expensive, faintly medicinal—that clings to everything. If you didn’t know better, you’d think this was a reward.
But the doors lock from the outside.
And three inches beneath my skin, something hums.
I felt it the moment they implanted it.
A pressure, not pain—like my body had been upgraded without my consent. Dr. Aldrich called it the Diamond Uterus, his voice reverent, almost religious. A bio-synthetic womb reinforced with nano-carbon fibers, threaded with microscopic sensors that monitor hormone levels, blood flow, embryonic development.
And obedience.
“If you attempt to terminate the pregnancy,” he’d said, “the system will alert Security. And me. Instantly.”
I didn’t ask what happens then.
Caspian visits every morning at nine.
Always perfectly on time. Always with flowers. Today it’s lilies—white, star-shaped, funereal. He sets them down like an offering and smiles at me as if I’m not wearing a medical tracking bracelet and as if Athena isn’t watching us both from the ceiling.
“How are we feeling today?” he asks.
We.
“I threw up,” I say flatly. “Twice.”
His mouth twitches, just barely. “That’s normal.”
“So is wanting to die when someone steals your body,” I reply.
He ignores that. He always ignores that. Instead, he taps his tablet, and the wall opposite my bed lights up. A video begins to play.
A little boy, maybe six, sits in a hospital bed. Tubes everywhere. His head is bald, his smile too big for his face.
“Congenital neural degeneration,” Caspian says softly. “Terminal. Unless we intervene at the genetic level.”
The video switches. A girl this time. Younger. Wheezing. Blue lips.
“Your work,” he continues, turning to me now, eyes intense, almost feverish. “Your genes, Iris. They can save them. Thousands like them. This isn’t imprisonment. It’s—”
“Slavery,” I cut in.
He flinches.
Just a little.
“They’re children,” he says. “My sister was one of them.”
There it is. The weapon he sharpens every day.
After he leaves, the room feels colder.
That’s when Lena comes in.
She’s assigned to clean the suite—dusting surfaces that don’t need dusting, changing sheets I haven’t slept in. She doesn’t look at me when she enters, doesn’t speak. The first three days, she was just another ghost.
On the fourth day, she bumps my bedside table.
A folded scrap of paper flutters to the floor.
She doesn’t stop walking.
My hands shake as I unfold it.
My sister was Donor #3.
She said the child lived.
I read it three times.
That night, when Athena dims the lights to simulate sleep, I slide out of bed and move to the terminal hidden behind the mirrored wall. My access was never fully revoked. They underestimated muscle memory.
It takes forty-three minutes to breach the secondary firewall.
What I find makes my vision blur.
The donor profiles—six before me—all marked deceased. But the embryo logs tell another story. Successful implantations. Gestational carriers. Birth records sealed under shell corporations.
Children sold.
Custom-built babies auctioned to billionaires under the guise of “private adoption.”
My stomach churns—not from pregnancy, but from rage.
Caspian isn’t just trying to save lives.
He’s running a market.
I don’t mean to see the folder on his private drive. I really don’t. But it’s there, mislabeled, unencrypted.
His sister.
Hundreds of photos. Hospital beds. Birthday cakes she never finished. A journal entry dated two weeks before her death:
If I can save even one child like her, maybe this will mean something.
I close the file with a sob caught in my throat.
Lena finds me crying the next morning.
She presses a map into my hand while Athena recalibrates the air filters.
“Maintenance tunnels,” she whispers. “They connect to the parking levels. But the AI sees everything.”
“I’ll distract it,” I say without knowing how.
The opportunity comes sooner than expected.
Caspian is talking—again—about legacy, about sacrifice, when the nausea hits hard and fast. I barely turn my head before I vomit all over him.
It’s spectacular.
On his shoes. His suit. The immaculate image ruined in seconds.
He steps back instinctively, horror flashing across his face—not concern. Disgust.
I see it.
And he knows I see it.
That night, he sends another video. A girl named Lily. Four years old. Smiling bravely while her mother cries off-camera.
I cry too.
Not for him.
For her.
For the monsters who taught me my body is a cure and a curse.
I move at midnight.
Lena’s map leads me into the maintenance tunnels—cold, damp, echoing. Athena’s hum is everywhere, searching. I crawl, heart pounding, until my hand brushes something brittle.
Bones.
Human.
A lab coat hangs in tatters nearby. A name badge clinks against concrete.
Donor #2.
On the wall, smeared in something dark and old, are three words:
THE CHILD WAS SOLD.
RUN.
I press my hand to my stomach, feeling the faint vibration beneath my skin.
I don’t know if I’m running to save my children.
Or to save myself.
But I know one thing now.
This place doesn’t create miracles.
It creates graves.