Chapter 204
(Third Person).
Two weeks had passed since the black van had swallowed the pregnant woman by the roadside — two weeks since her muffled scream was silenced under gloved palms.
In the underground corridors of Section Nine , the fluorescent lights flickered with a cold, clinical disinterest.
Down here, time was measured not in days, but in heartbeats… and in how long a body could last under a scalpel.
Dr. Nera paused outside Observation Room C, clipboard in hand. Her eyes flicked to the notes:
Subject 27-B: Human, female, approximately eight months gestation.
Yet when she lifted her gaze through the small reinforced window, what she saw made her heart squeeze, though she quickly buried it under practised detachment.
The woman, barely thirty, lay strapped to a gurney, ankles and wrists bound in padded restraints.
Strands of sweat-soaked hair clung to her pale forehead. And her belly… round, straining, as if pleading silently for the nightmare to end.
Nera’s colleague, Dr. Halvors, joined her. His voice, low and almost bored, carried no warmth.
“She’s overdue now,” he murmured. “We can’t risk complications. Schedule the extraction.”
“C-section?” Nera asked, though she already knew the answer.
“Of course,” he said. “We need the infant alive. As pure as possible.”
Moments later, in the small theatre lit by cruel white lamps, two masked doctors stood over the unconscious woman who had been kidnapped a few weeks ago.
They had sedated her hours earlier, muttering about ’minimizing distress.’
In truth, they feared her screaming more than they feared her pain.
The machines beeped, a steady, artificial lullaby.
“Scalpel,” Dr. Halvors said.
Dr. Nera handed it over, fingers trembling almost imperceptibly.
With the first careful incision, warm blood rose.
Within minutes, the child emerged, slick and red, wailing at the cold and light.
Halvors barely glanced at the mother. His eyes fixated on the baby, searching for signs of viability.
“Umbilical,” he ordered. A nurse clamped and cut.
The mother’s chest rose and fell in a slow, shallow rhythm. But the baby’s cries were too strong.
“Take it,” Halvors barked.
A junior nurse, her hands trembling, carried the infant toward the neonatal observation unit — a sterile glass tank on the other side of the room.
Nera turned back to the mother. “What about her?” she asked softly.
“Induce coma,” Halvors replied, wiping his brow. “She can’t go back yet. The bruising needs to fade first.”
As the nurse injected the sedative, the woman’s breaths slowed… and then deepened into an unnatural stillness.
—
In Section Nine’s holding cells, the wolves shifted restlessly. They couldn’t see the operating room, but they smelled the fresh blood.
One young male bared his teeth, a growl rumbling low in his chest.
Across the corridor, Levik — the young assistant — paused, the tray in his hands shaking. The smell clawed at him too: metallic, raw, alive.
In his chest, something humane stirred, but he swallowed it down, turned, and kept walking.
Several hours later, under the cover of the city’s deepest night, a black, unmarked van rumbled out of the lab’s hidden freight entrance.
Inside, the woman lay limp on a stretcher, breathing shallowly.
Two men in black coats sat beside her. One checked her pulse; the other glanced anxiously at the clock.
They drove for nearly an hour, finally turning onto a potholed road fringed by old factories and forgotten warehouses.
Without words, they lifted her body — still breathing, though barely — and laid her by the curb under the dim glow of a streetlight.
Above them, a CCTV camera turned silently, capturing their faces only in shadows.
They stepped back, climbed into the van, and drove away — the woman’s pale hand slipping off the stretcher to brush against the cold concrete.
—
Back in Section Nine, Dr. Nera watched the CCTV feed as the van returned empty.
“It’s done,” Halvors said.
Nera didn’t answer. Her gaze lingered on the feed: the woman lying alone in the dark, under indifferent starlight.
“Do you ever wonder if this will be enough?” she whispered.
Halvors snorted. “It’s never enough. But it’s necessary.”
And then, quietly, almost to himself, he added, “We can’t afford conscience now, Nera. Not this far in.”
—
The air smelled of damp concrete and stale oil.
A brittle wind moved litter across the empty street, stirring discarded paper cups and crushed cigarette cartons.
The woman from earlier lay there, on the cold asphalt beside the crumbling curb, the glow from the streetlamp painting harsh shadows across her face.
For a while, there was only darkness inside her head. Then her eyelids twitched, and a faint rasp of breath scraped at the rawness of her throat.
Pain bloomed across her abdomen — deep, foreign pain that seemed to pulse with her heartbeat.
She shifted, a dry gasp tearing from her lips.
She tried to roll onto her back, but the pain in her belly flared, sharp and violent, as if invisible knives had been left inside her.
A whimper broke free. Then she lifted trembling hands to her stomach.
For a breathless second, she expected the familiar rise of her swollen belly — the living weight she had carried for months.
But under her shaking palms, there was nothing.
Immediately, confusion gave way to horror.
Her hands scrabbled across her abdomen, fingertips brushing raw sutures and sticky residue.
She traced the swollen, clumsily stitched line that curved across her skin, and her breath caught, breaking on a ragged sob.
She was empty. The baby was gone.
A strangled cry rose in her chest, tore out of her mouth before she could swallow it back.
“My baby—”
“My baby!”
She pressed her forehead to the cold concrete, nails digging into the tarred road, until fresh blood bloomed under her fingers.
No one came to comfort her.
After long minutes, her cries weakened. Only shallow, broken breaths remained, shuddering through her.
She lay on her side, arms protectively curled around her absent child.
Her chest hurt from sobbing; her throat burned; her body trembled violently. But nothing could soothe the emptiness carved inside her.
In the ruin of her mind, a single question circled endlessly, splintering against itself:
Did those bastards take my baby?