Chapter 4: The Safehouse Below the Backlot
The travel from motel hideout to secure safehouse consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
Ethan’s hand found the grip of the pistol. The weight meant nothing; the silence meant everything. A fresh drone screen bloomed in the smoke, and Flynn’s face smiled down at Ethan: “You can hide from the system, Mercer, but not from the boy’s DNA.”
The smile was a perfect, practiced thing. The smile of a man who had never once been told no.
Ethan’s thumb slid across the safety—one click, loud as a gunshot in the cramped staging room. The drone’s camera whirred, autofocus adjusting, framing him against the stained concrete wall. It was a cheap model, a DJI knockoff with a thermal cam rigged to the underside. Someone had wanted eyes, not firepower. Flynn wanted to watch.
“You’re bluffing,” Ethan said. His voice came out flat. He could feel Iris behind him, pressed into the corner where the pipes jogged around a support column. Jace was under her jacket, his small hands fisted in the hem of her shirt. “You don’t have the authority to run a DNA profile through the county network. Not without a judicial stamp.”
Flynn’s laugh crackled through the drone’s tinny speaker. “I don’t need the county network. Blackthorn Diagnostics runs its own sequencer in the lab two floors up. A buccal swab from any cup he’s drunk from, a hair from his pillowcase—I already have the data, Mercer. I’m just waiting for the host to match it against the registry.”
The drone hovered, rotors humming a nervous F-sharp. Ethan counted the exits: the door behind him, a shattered window to the right, a ventilation grate in the ceiling too small for anything but a raccoon. Nothing good. The smoke from the stairwell incursion was coiling under the door, rolling in thin gray tongues along the floor.
Reid’s voice crackled through Ethan’s earpiece. “Boss. Backlot courtyard, northwest corner. Grille gate’s unlatched. I can see the basement access, but you’ve got thirty seconds before the secondary patrol loops back around the soundstages.”
Thirty seconds. Ethan didn’t look at the drone. He looked at the window. It gave onto a trash chute that dropped to the loading dock. From the dock, a maintenance ladder ran along the fence line to the courtyard. It was a stupid route. It was the only route.
“You want to watch?” Ethan said, finally meeting the camera lens. “Then watch this.”
He grabbed Iris’s arm—not rough, but firm, the way you’d grab a parachute strap—and pulled her toward the window. Jace made a small, swallowed noise. Ethan kicked the frame loose with the heel of his boot. The glass was already spiderwebbed, thin and cheap. It went out in a sheet.
“Reid,” Ethan said into the mic, “tell me the fence is hot.”
“It’s not. That’s the trick. Blackthorn’s people think we’re dumb.”
Ethan didn’t smile. He swung Jace into his arms, feeling the boy’s ribs through his hoodie, counting them in three quick beats. “Stay tight,” he murmured into Jace’s hair. “Don’t look back.”
He went through the window.
The landing burnt through his heels, and the dumpster lid bucked under his weight. He staggered, found his balance, and ran. Iris was already moving, her boots scuffing on the asphalt. The drone followed, a mechanical mosquito orbiting their heads. Its camera light blinked red.
“This is adorable,” Flynn’s voice chirped. “A family jog. Really. But the sequencer is already on cycle four. You know how long it takes to match a full genome? Less time than it takes to finish this conversation.”
Ethan didn’t answer. He pumped his arms, cradling Jace against his chest. The ladder was rusted, and one rung crumbled under his weight. He swung onto the fence top, handed Jace to Reid’s waiting arms on the other side. The courtyard was a dead set of facades—painted storefronts, a mock café with a mural of chipped espresso cups. The safehouse door was hidden behind a warped plywood panel stamped PROPERTY OF MERIDIAN STUDIOS.
Reid pulled the panel aside. The door’s biometric scanner flickered, read Reid’s palm, and clicked open. Ethan went in sideways, pulling Iris after him by the wrist. The door sealed behind them with a pneumatic sigh.
The drone hovered outside, its camera pressed against the tiny frosted window. For a moment, Ethan thought Flynn would try to force it through. Then the rotors tilted, and the drone climbed away.
“He’ll be back with the heavier hardware,” Reid said, already moving down the concrete stairs, pulling a tablet from his jacket. “We’ve got maybe an hour before he’s desperate enough to call a city emergency and make up a gas leak.”
“Then we make better use of an hour,” Ethan said.
The safehouse was an old film vault—one of those basement cells where studios used to lock negatives against fire. The walls were poured concrete, and the air smelt of dust and a faint, acidic bite of old film stock. A generator hummed in a closet behind a false wall. The Wi-Fi was hardlined through a buried cable that no one had touched since the 80s.
Iris set Jace down on a sofa that was maybe twenty years old, its cushions worn to the foam. She knelt, cupping his face. “You okay?”
Jace nodded, but his eyes were still too wide. He was clamping his jaw in a way Ethan recognized—trying not to cry in front of a stranger. Reid was a stranger to him. Reid with his tactical vest and his shaved head and the carbine slung across his back.
“This is Reid,” Iris said. “He’s my friend. He helps us.”
Jace looked at Ethan for confirmation. Ethan nodded once. The boy’s shoulders unhitched a fraction.
Iris stood and pulled the teddy bear from her shoulder bag. The bag was scuffed canvas, a thrift store find, but the bear was pristine—cream fur, a red bow sewn at its collar. It was the only thing Jace had taken with him when he’d left the foster rotation years ago. Ethan had wondered about it, but he’d assumed it was just a comfort object.
He was wrong.
Iris turned the bear over. Her fingernails found the stitching along the back seam, worked through the taut cotton seam. She slid a hand in, probing the foam stuffing. Her face was tight.
“Iris, what are you doing?” Ethan asked.
“Miriam found something,” Iris said, not looking up. “Eighteen months ago, when she was digging into the Blackthorn pediatric contracts. She couldn’t access the originals—Victor’s lawyers have the vault they’re kept in. But there was a leak. A storage unit auction, of all things. A Blackthorn IT consultant went to prison for embezzlement, his assets auctioned. His backup drives were sold to a data recycler, and Miriam bought them for thirty dollars.”
She pulled out a memory strip—a thin rectangle of carbon-coded plastic, no bigger than a film-frame negative. It shimmered in the dim light, smelling of ozone. She held it up to the bare hanging bulb, like a jeweler examining a stone.
“This is the original fetal-consent order,” she said. “Signed by Victor Blackthorn and the surrogate’s legal counsel, at a fertility clinic in Reno. It includes the genetic-transfer contract—the terms under which Blackthorn’s stored sperm was used to fertilize a donor egg. And buried in the clause, there’s a line. A release of parental claim in exchange for the right to harvest stem cells from the child’s bone marrow at age seven.”
Ethan’s body went still. He didn’t need to hear the rest to know what it meant. He looked at Jace, who was hugging the bear now, holding it upside down, one ear dangling.
“He doesn’t have a birth certificate,” Ethan said. “We couldn’t ever find one. The county said the records were sealed.”
“Because there is no birth certificate,” Iris said. “There’s a genetic transfer certificate. Under Nevada law, Victor didn’t adopt Jace. He manufactured him. The contract names him ‘recipient of biological product’ and ‘sole custodian of genetic assets.’”
Reid was silent. He’d stopped fiddling with the tablet, and his face was a hard flat mask. “That’s a money laundering scaffold,” he said. “The contract would let Blackthorn claim any medical research involving Jace’s DNA as intellectual property. Every sequencer he’s owned, every white paper he’s ever published on gene therapy, it’s all derivative of a child he never legally fathered.”
“He didn’t want a son,” Ethan said. The words came out in a flat, cold monotone. “He wanted a donor. A renewable resource. Seven years old is the peak for bone marrow stem cell recovery. That’s why he’s priority-one on every network in the city. He’s not running from us—he’s running before the harvest window closes.”
Jace didn’t look at them. He was stroking the bear’s ear. His small fingers moved in a rhythm—one, two, three, four—the beat of a song no one else could hear.
“I can’t open the strip here,” Iris said. Her voice had an edge to it. Regret, or a mask over fear. “The encryption is nested four layers deep. Miriam has the decryption keys, but she needs to port them through the cleared uplink at the city media relay to avoid triggering Blackthorn’s network alarms.”
“So we have to go to the network,” Ethan said.
“No,” Iris corrected, setting the strip down on the crate that served as a coffee table. “We have to make the network come to us.”
She tapped her ear. “Miriam? You there?”
There was a burst of static, then Miriam’s voice, tinny but familiar. “I’m here. Listen—I found the one event Victor can’t cancel. The Dreamline Integrity Hearing. It’s a legislative public-comment session on media deregulation. Dreamline’s the biggest stream distributor on the West Coast, and Victor’s a Board member. If he skips it, the board votes him off the supervisory committee, and he loses oversight of the licensing that his whole drone network runs on. It’s the one date he can’t reschedule.”
Ethan leaned over the crate, looking at the tablet Reid had propped up. Miriam had pulled a live feed from the city’s public utility cam, pointing at the courthouse steps. A banner came up: DREAMLINE INTEGRITY HEARING—THURSDAY 7:00 A.M.
“He’ll be there,” Ethan said. “He’ll walk right to the podium, smile, and lie to the board about Blackthorn’s compliance records. And all of that will be live-streamed to every screen in the city.”
“Then we do it then,” Iris said. “We patch the memory strip’s contents into the hearing feed. We don’t let the strip play on our network connection—we bounce it through Dreamline’s own relays. The moment Victor starts talking, his face appears on every screen in the auditorium. The contract. The signature. The child’s ID number.”
Reid was shaking his head. “You’d be framing the broadcast for a hack. Even if we get the feed up, Dreamline’s engineers will kill it in forty seconds flat. And they’ll trace the injection point. We’ll lose our tunnel.”
Jace looked up then, his voice small. “Daddy, where’s my teddy’s stuffing?”
They all turned. The bear was in Jace’s lap, back seam gaping. Something small and metallic winked in the hollow of the bear’s belly. Ethan moved, knelt, and gently slid it out.
It was a data key. A blackened, micro-USB key with a teal stripe, worn down from years of friction against the toy’s interior seam. It was labeled with a handwritten marker: “MIRA / ACCESS / SECTOR 4.”
Iris stared at it. Her lips parted. “That’s a laboratory gateway key. It’s used to access Blackthorn’s closed sample registry—the one that lists the fetal tissue blocks. She used to hide her passwords in my toys when she was alive.”
Ethan didn’t ask who “she” was. He turned the key over. It was heavier than it looked—metal-cased, with a small blinking LED in the tip. It hadn’t been accessed in years, but it was still encoded.
“If this gets into the hearing feed,” Miriam’s voice said, quieter now, from Iris’s ear, “we don’t just show the contract. We show the samples. The reproductive vault, the storage facility, the numbers assigned to each donor oval. Every fetus Blackthorn owns that was created without a mother’s full consent.”
Iris looked up at Ethan, then at Jace. Jace had put the bear back together, pressing the seam together with his thumbs. He didn’t know what he was holding. He didn’t need to.
“The hearing goes live at seven,” Iris said. “We have eleven hours and forty minutes to crack that key, build the relay bridge, and get one of us past security to an injection port inside the courthouse.”
Reid tapped the tablet. “I can get you a fake ID for a press tech. There’s a secondary back entrance through the loading dock. But we only get one pass. Once we’re in, the room’s cameras will be on us, and the moment the feed cuts, our exit is gone.”
“Jace stays here,” Ethan said. His voice was flat, final. “The locks are automated. Miriam can run block scripts on any signal that tries to ping this address. He’s not going to be within a mile of the courthouse.”
“He can’t be alone,” Iris said.
“He’ll have your voice in his ear,” Ethan said. “And he’ll have that key.”
Jace was staring at them. His eyes moved from Ethan to Iris to the broken stairs outside. He didn’t cry. He looked like he was doing the math—sizes, distances, potentials. A small Seven-year-old accountant calculating the odds.
Iris reached into the bag and pulled out the memory strip again. She laid it on the crate beside the key. The two pieces of evidence—the paper trail and the biological key—fit each other like a lock and a door.
“We don’t need to break in,” she said slowly. “We need to make Victor walk into the trap himself.”
Ethan waited.
“The hearing is a public forum,” Iris said, rolling the strip between her fingers. “Victor will stand at the podium and say how much he values ‘family integrity.’ How Blackthorn Diagnostics has never traded in biological material without consent. And in that moment—that exact moment—the counter-surveillance that he’s running against us is turned outward, toward the audience. He won’t be watching his own feed.”
“You’ll be on the floor,” Ethan said.
“No.” She shook her head. “The injection port doesn’t need a physical presence. If Miriam can route the key’s decryption through Dreamline’s licensing hub, we don’t even need to be in the room. We need something in the room with him. Something that can play a file on the podium display without him touching it.”
Ethan looked at the bear. Then at the key. Then at his son.
Jace met his gaze, unblinking.
“My friend,” Iris said from beside him. “Grayson lives in the witness box. He’s the court stenographer. He sat in the same seat on the commission for the last eight years.”
Ethan frowned. “How do we reach Grayson without tripping Blackthorn’s network?”
“We don’t,” Iris admitted. “We trip a smaller network first. We call the city clerk’s office and tell them the hearing needs a live-subtitles service update for the public stream. A technician comes in during the early morning to update the software. Grayson lets him in.”
“Let me guess,” Ethan said, “that technician is either Reed’s cousin or Reid with a thirty-dollar wig.”
Reid cracked a thin smile. “I don’t wear wigs. But I do know a guy who owes me a favor in the clerk’s office.”
Ethan looked at the table, at the plan that was not a plan yet. Fetal-consent orders. Genetic-transfer contracts. A child who was never given a name because he was only ever meant to be a product. What drove them forward was that Jace was still here, still breathing, still holding his teddy together with small, careful fingers.
Iris looked from the teddy bear to Ethan and said, “If we can’t make Victor show the world what he wanted from my son, this apartment will be our coffin. He has to be the one to reveal the key.”