“Where is she?”I asked.
“Ward Nine,” he said, turning on his heel.“The sub-basement bunker.
We bypassed the civilian neurology floor entirely.”
“Why?”
Vance didn’t answer until the stainless steel freight elevator had dropped three levels below the water table, its cables groaning in the grease-packed shafts.
“Because the woman in that transport pod didn’t have an intracranial hematoma, Samantha.”
The air in the descending box suddenly felt thin, as if an exhaust valve had opened somewhere above our heads.
“Miller’s charts showed three depressed skull fractures,” I said, my voice steady, iron-plated.“A ruptured spleen.
Severe hypoxia.
I saw the monitor readings with my own eyes at St.
Jude.”
“Miller’s charts were synthetic,” Vance replied smoothly.He touched his keycard to the biometric reader beside the brass doors.
A green LED flashed, followed by a double beep.
“The telemetry feeds piped to the ICU display were looped from a digital training mannequin stored in the adjacent simulation lab.
