Anna held her breath and carefully inserted the forceps.
The moment the metal touched, alarms exploded.
“HEY! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!”
A nurse burst through the door and froze.
“SECURITY! GET THAT CHILD OUT!”
Anna didn’t stop.
She closed the forceps.
Whatever it was fought back.
She pulled—hard—with everything she had.
A guard grabbed her arm and yanked her backward. Anna fell, but her grip held.
And dangling from the forceps, twisting violently under the hospital lights, was something that made the nurse scream.
It wasn’t a clot.
It was a centipede.
Long. Reddish-brown. Covered in mucus and blood. Dozens of legs writhing.
Silence crashed over the room.
The guard let go.
Dr. Collins stood frozen.
On the bed, the boy sucked in a massive, clean breath.
The wet rasp vanished.
Oxygen levels climbed.
80… 85… 90…
Anna stood up slowly.
“It was eating his air,” she said quietly. “Just like it ate my dad’s.”
Dr. Collins collected the creature with shaking hands.
“Scolopendra… but modified,” he whispered. “This isn’t illness. This is deliberate.”
Everything unraveled after that.
Security footage. A fake doctor.
Marcus Thorne, a disgraced former business partner of Charles Beaumont.
Genetically altered parasites. Revenge.
And a test subject months earlier.
Anna’s father.
Justice followed.
But the truth that echoed loudest in the halls of St. Regina wasn’t medical.
It was simple.
Sometimes the truth isn’t in million-dollar machines or famous experts.
Sometimes…
it’s seen by a child everyone ignored.
And spoken by the one brave enough to say it out loud.
