## CHAPTER 13 — SUBJECT TWELVE
The elevator stopped beneath the registered foundation of the courthouse.
Its doors opened onto a corridor lined with locked cabinets.
Dust covered the floor, but several fresh footprints led toward a steel door.
Judge Vale entered another code.
Inside was a hidden records room.
Thousands of files filled the shelves.
Each was marked with a number instead of a name.
Harrison found Subject 12.
The file contained hospital records from the year he was born.
According to the documents, Elise had delivered a baby boy who died after seventeen minutes.
Three hours later, another infant was placed in her arms.
Harrison.
His biological parents were not identified.
Khloe read the file in silence after Harrison brought it to the secure office later that morning.
“You’re still my brother,” she said.
“We don’t know what I am.”
“You’re the person who held my hand when Dad disappeared. You’re the person who fought for me when Evan tried to destroy my life. A file doesn’t change that.”
Harrison looked toward Nora sleeping in her carrier.
“It changes why they’re watching us.”
The file contained one additional detail.
Subject 12 had been assigned to the Cole family under Daniel’s authorization.
That suggested Daniel had knowingly participated in the transfer.
Elise denied knowing anything about it.
“The doctors told me you survived,” she said. “They never said another baby had died.”
“Did Dad ever discuss my birth?”
“No.”
“Did he insist on using a particular hospital?”
Elise hesitated.
“Yes.”
Harrison closed the file.
Khloe noticed a medical bracelet attached to the final page.
The name printed on it was not Harrison.
It read:
MICHAEL VALE.
Judge Vale’s biological son had supposedly died shortly after birth.
Harrison confronted the judge again.
Vale admitted that his wife gave birth to a healthy boy on the same night Elise delivered.
The child disappeared from the hospital.
“My wife was told he died,” Vale said. “Daniel later discovered the transfer.”
“Am I Michael Vale?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have had twenty-three years to run a DNA test.”
“I was afraid of what would happen if the result entered any medical system.”
Harrison obtained private testing materials and collected samples.
Before the samples could be analyzed, Leo called.
Mara Ellis had been located unconscious inside an abandoned records warehouse.
She had suffered a head injury but was alive.
One sentence had been written on the wall above her.
SUBJECT TWELVE BELONGS TO THE ARCHIVE.
Harrison rushed to the hospital.
Mara regained consciousness briefly.
She gripped his wrist.
“They know about the test.”
“Who?”
“The woman in the gray room.”
“What woman?”
“She raised the reassigned children.”
“Give me her name.”
Mara struggled to breathe.
“She attended Khloe’s trial every day.”
Harrison remembered the spectators.
Reporters.
Law students.
Members of the public.
Families waiting for other cases.
“Which woman?”
Mara’s eyes moved toward the hospital doorway.
A nurse stood there holding a syringe.
Mara began shaking violently.
The nurse turned and ran.
Harrison chased her through the hall, but she escaped through a stairwell.
When he returned, Mara’s bed was empty.
May you like
The medical staff insisted no patient named Mara Ellis had ever been admitted.
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