Chapter 7 - GRACE
Ranger Morris’s team broke through the barn wall before the gas overwhelmed us.
Rachel survived.
Anna survived.
Grace collapsed but regained consciousness in the ambulance.
I rode beside her.
She stared at me with frightened suspicion.
Walter had told her I gave her away.
Margaret visited her every year and called herself Grandma.
Michael had visited twice.
He claimed he did not remember.
Grace remembered him.
“He yelled at the doctors,” she said.
Michael had once tried to remove her from Genesis.
They drugged him afterward.
That missing memory may have been real.
But Grace also remembered him telling Walter that obedience was necessary.
Even his resistance had limits.
Rachel gave investigators access codes to a Genesis research site beneath an agricultural facility outside Austin.
Federal agents raided it.
They found four of the Bluebonnet children.
The fifth had been moved.
The sixth had died during an unauthorized procedure.
Subject 7—my unborn daughter—was meant to replace the lost child.
Walter believed each generation strengthened the mutation.
Genesis investors believed the trait could lead to treatments worth billions.
Margaret’s family tradition was a cover for human experimentation.
Grace had undergone dozens of procedures.
She showed me small scars along her arm.
“They said I was helping people.”
“You were a child.”
“Am I still theirs?”
“No.”
I said it before any court made the decision.
“No one owns you.”
Grace did not call me Mom again.
Not yet.
She allowed me to sit beside her.
That was enough.
Walter escaped the research facility minutes before the raid.
He left behind one video.
He stood inside the farmhouse living room beside the wooden pillar.
“Emily,” he said, “Margaret failed because she allowed emotion into the program.”
Margaret watched the video from custody.
For the first time, she looked frightened.
Walter continued.
“The final birth will happen where the first one did.”
Then the camera moved toward Anna.
May you like
She was no longer beside me.
Walter had taken my mother from the hospital.
