I knelt down in front of him, keeping my distance so I wouldn’t frighten him. “Your brother?” I asked softly.
Leo nodded slowly, tears welling in his dark eyes. “We were in a house with Miss Karen. There were five of us. All different ages. My brother had a cough. A bad one. Miss Karen said he was getting a special doctor. A rich family wanted him. She put him in the car with the blue box. He never came back. Then she told me it was my turn to get a doctor.”
The reality of the operation hit me with devastating clarity. Karen wasn’t just a rogue transporter. She was operating a private farm. She took in undocumented or lost children, housed them, took their blood samples, and put them in a database for black-market buyers. Whenever a wealthy client needed a transplant—an organ, bone marrow, blood—they checked the database. If there was a match, Karen delivered the child. The children never survived the extractions.
I looked at the blinking green light on the GPS tracker. I had to smash it. I reached for a heavy wrench lying in the dirt.
Before my fingers touched the metal, the deafening roar of a high-powered engine shattered the silence of the night.
Blinding white halogen headlights flooded the garage, pinning me in their glare. A massive, matte-black tactical SUV had just aggressively pulled into the abandoned gas station lot, cutting off our only exit.
The doors flew open. Two men stepped out. They weren’t local cops. They were dressed in black tactical gear, armed with suppressed rifles. Professional fixers. They had tracked the GPS straight to us.
“Get behind the truck, Leo! Hide!” I roared, drawing my knife and lunging toward the shadows.
Before I could reach the cover of the rusted vehicle, a sharp, compressed thwack echoed from the SUV. Something slammed into my chest with the force of a hammer. Pain, sharp and electric, exploded through my nervous system.
It was a weaponized taser dart, fired from a specialized rifle. Fifty thousand volts ripped through my muscles. My legs gave out instantly, and I crashed face-first onto the concrete floor. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. My entire body was locked in a violent, agonizing spasm.
Through my blurry vision, I saw the heavy black boots of the fixer approach me. He kicked my knife away.
Then, I heard Leo scream. It was a sound that would haunt me for the rest of my life—a pure, desperate shriek as the second man dragged the boy out from behind the truck.
“No!” I tried to yell, but my mouth wouldn’t form the words.
The fixer standing over me leaned down. His face was covered by a black mask, but his eyes were dead and empty. He pulled his heavy steel-toed boot back and drove it directly into the side of my head.
The world went violently black.
I woke up tasting dirt and copper.
A dull, throbbing agony pounded in my skull with every beat of my heart, and my ribs burned as if they had been cracked in half. The air around me was suffocatingly hot, smelling heavily of aviation fuel and dry brush. I tried to lift my hands to wipe the blood from my eyes, but they wouldn’t move. My wrists were bound tightly behind my back with heavy-duty industrial zip-ties. I was lying in the dirt floor of a dark, corrugated metal shed.
Memory rushed back in a violent wave. The abandoned gas station. The fixers. Leo’s scream.
I rolled onto my side, ignoring the sharp pain in my chest, and forced myself into a sitting position. Through the gaps in the rusted metal walls of the shed, I could see the glow of floodlights. I dragged myself to the wall and peered through a rusted hole.