Emergency Room Dawn
Yundu Central Hospital Emergency Observation Room
When the smell of disinfectant pierced her dream, Charlotte was counting the dripping frequency of the drip tube. This was a habit she developed when she accompanied her father to fight cancer that year - whenever fear filled her throat, she would build a dam with numbers. At this moment, the silence at three o'clock in the morning was broken by the monitor of the bed next door, and the green light cast an electrocardiogram mountain on the wall.
Alexander's bed was covered with a blue curtain.
When she counted to the 674th drop, there was a sound of glass breaking behind the curtain. The moment she stepped on the cold floor tiles barefoot, memories were like liquid medicine injected into the veins: on the night when he was nineteen, he also broke the painkiller bottle in this way when he had acute gastric bleeding, and the glass shards bloomed scarlet flowers between their entangled fingers.
"Get out." Alexander's voice was hoarse and unfamiliar.
Charlotte paused in her action of lifting the corner of the curtain. The moonlight leaked in from the blinds, cutting the outline of his profile into pieces. He clutched a torn hospital gown in his left hand, the plaster on his right arm was stained with mottled brown-red, and the bandages on the bedside table were scattered like shed snakes.
The nurse pushed the dressing cart and fled in a hurry. Charlotte picked up the ampoule that rolled to her feet, and the label printed with "morphine" was blurred by her fingernails.
"Lawyer Wang is dead." She put the painkillers on the medical tray, "The autopsy report shows that he had a heart transplant three years ago."
The monitor suddenly made a shrill long beep. Alexander tore off the electrode pads on his chest, and the scars on his cold white skin were winding like a mysterious river network. Charlotte noticed a freshly sutured wound between his ribs, and the stitches were surprisingly similar to the circuit diagram in her father's laboratory notebook.
"Time of death?"
"37 minutes after you were shot."
He laughed out loud and groaned when he pulled the wound. This expression reminded Charlotte of the heavy rain on the day of the graduation ceremony. His wet shirt stuck to his body, and he asked her with a smile if she dared to elope to Glasgow.
"Do you believe it now?" He dipped the blood-soaked gauze and drew a DNA double helix on the bed sheet. "The entanglement between the Zhou and Lin families is more dirty than you think."
Outside the window, the red and blue ceiling lights of the ambulance swept across the wall. In an instant, Charlotte saw clearly what he drew - the number "C-0917" was intertwined between the spirals, which was the specimen code of her father's laboratory.
"What does it mean?"
"It means..." He suddenly grabbed her wrist, and the burning pain of the iodine cotton swab pierced her bone marrow. "The thing your father protected until his death is killing you."
The monitor screamed again. Charlotte's strength to break free caused the needle to slip out of the blood vessel, and blood splashed on his open hospital gown, blooming poppies on the handwriting of "C-0917".
In the chaos, she touched the metal USB flash drive. The touch he had stuffed into my palm last night was still hot in my palm, but now it was as cold as the nameplate in the morgue.
"The password is September 17, 2007." Alexander's voice was mixed with the hum of electronic equipment, "The date of the explosion in your father's laboratory."
The corridor suddenly heard dense footsteps. Charlotte instinctively pulled the curtain tightly, and this action made them both freeze at the same time - on that absurd first night when she was 19 years old, she had also pulled the dormitory bed curtain like this, and he smiled and bit the curtain rope.
"Mr. Zhou needs to be transferred to another hospital immediately!"
As the men in dark gray suits rushed in, Charlotte was squeezed to the corner. She saw that the leading bodyguard had the lightning logo of Thunder Appliances embroidered on his cuffs, and Alexander allowed them to inject him with unknown drugs, but his eyes were fixed on the USB flash drive she hid behind her.
"Don't believe the photos in the will..." He had not finished his lip language when half of his face was covered by the oxygen mask.
The heavy rain at four o'clock in the morning was beating against the window frame. Charlotte stood in the empty observation room, looking at the dried blood on the bed sheet. Next to the DNA graffiti, a line of small words appeared at some point:
Laboratory cold storage B-2
The USB drive carved deep marks on her palm. The password prompt interface glowed with a faint blue light, and the countdown showed that there were 71 hours left. As she entered the string of numbers that were burned into her bones, she heard her father's dying gasps in her chest, mixed with the ticking of the electronic clock in the hospital corridor.
The moment the file was unlocked, the emergency building suddenly lost power.
When the emergency lights came on, a news push popped up on the phone screen: "Morning Star Group Announces Genetic Test Report of Heirs". On the thumbnail, Alexander's profile overlapped with Zhou Weimin's photo in his youth like a mirror image, and the accompanying text was scarlet and glaring:
On the legal inheritance rights of experimental subject C-0917