The night-vision surveillance in the Central Park Rose Garden suddenly went offline completely at 2:17 a.m. Lila gripped the selfie stick tightly as the fill-in light illuminated the tombstone-shaped rose bushes in a ghastly green color: "Look, families, it's a labyrinth made out of the 999 everlasting roses that Jared gave me ..."
The pop-ups were suddenly filled with "Behind!" Swipe. Her Gucci heels sank into the loose dirt as she turned around, and the camera flashed the shredded hem of a pregnant woman's dress. Three million viewers witnessed the bloated figure fall from the observation deck, Lila's Chanel nail-polished hands appearing just at the edge of the viewfinder frame.
"No, no, not that!" Lila's scream ripped through the night sky at the same time as the sirens. As she rushes to the railing, the pregnant woman's body is stuck at an eerie angle among the rose thorn bushes, amniotic fluid mixed with blood glowing mother-of-pearl in the moonlight. The night-vision lens autofocused, and the ultrasound image of the body at the small of its back suddenly popped up on the air-the outline of the embryo perfectly overlapped with the old Benson's childhood photo.
"Murderer!" the tsunami of pop-ups, Lila spots the envelope clutched in the pregnant woman's right hand. The pulled-out copy of the will has a fresh lipstick next to Benson Sr.'s signature-the very same Dior 999 color she left in Ethan's office this morning.
At the same moment, the iris scanner in Sotheby's underground vault illuminates with a red light, and Violet removes her contacts to reveal bio-lenses made from the dead man's corneas. The moment the vault door slides open, she rips off her silicone mask at the vent camera - the face turns out to be the pregnant woman who fell to her death on the air.
"Good evening, Mr. Benson." She smiled softly at the bronze equivalent of Benson Sr. inside the vault, where the Hermes silk scarf-wrapped embryo culture vial was oozing a pale green liquid. The scepter in the bronze statue's hand suddenly spun of its own accord, revealing the fingerprint collector built into it, and as Violet pressed the index finger of the pregnant corpse to it, the sapphire at the top of the scepter projected a holographic will: 'To be opened by the heir to my lineage'.
The bulletproof glass display case rises in response, and Violet's breath suddenly freezes. Next to the blue diamond that was rumored to have sunk in the river with Amber lies an insulin pen engraved in Russian-exactly the same as the one Jared carries with him. As she picks up the blue diamond with her tweezers, the diamond prongs suddenly refract the hidden writing: for real roses.
The alarm booms without warning, and the temperature in the vault begins to plummet.Violet sees her reflection in the frosted glass being covered by another redhead-it's pre-plastic surgery Amber, dripping wet with Hudson River water.
Ethan's lab is drenched in an eerie blue light as the DNA strands of embryonic cells are replicating themselves on a projection screen. As he injects the last drop of cloning serum into a test tube, the cells under the microscope suddenly burst into rose thorn synapses. These synapses penetrated the petri dish and etched latitude and longitude coordinates on the lab bench - the exact location of the body crash that had been broadcast live three hours earlier.
The cell phone suddenly plays the church security footage, and Ethan sees Violet wearing a human skin mask and posing the pregnant woman's body in a penitent position. But when he zooms in on the tattoo behind the corpse's ear, cold sweat instantly soaks through his white coat - that phoenix nirvana motif is exactly the same as his mother's scrawl on her medical record book before she died.
The moonstone in the safe suddenly beeps, and when Ethan shines a laser pointer on it, a holographic map emerges. The red dots are densely packed to form the word "Vengeance" in Russian, and the brightest coordinates are thirty meters below Sotheby's. As he grabs his car keys, the incubator explodes and the cloned cells crawl up his wrist like living creatures, spelling out the Morse code for "stop breathing" on the surface of his skin.
The one-way mirror in the police interrogation room shows Lila's devastated face. A replay shows a metallic reflection in a rose bush 0.3 seconds before she "pushed". The technician zooms in 10,800 times to reveal a fishing line-like nanofiber wrapped around the pregnant woman's ankle.
"It's a setup!" Lila's wedding ring scraped a piercing chirp against the tabletop, "There must be ... underneath those roses."
"A spring-loaded device?" The interrogator pushed in the evidence bag containing the dirt-stained miniature hydraulic lever, "It's got your fingerprints all over it." A cell phone suddenly rings inside the bag, the caller ID shows Jared's private number. The moment she presses the answer button, Violet's processed recording explodes in the interrogation room, "Process it clean, just like you did three years ago."
Lila's Chanel jacket is suddenly oozing blood, and the tracker sewn into the lining is sending GPS coordinates to all the media. When the officer rips open the lapel, what falls out is not the locator, but a photo of Benson Sr. with the pregnant woman in the maternity ward - the time of day the photo was taken around the edges of the photo shows it was taken on the seventh day after Jared's successful proposal.
Violet trudges through the vault's -50-degree cold temperatures, exhaling white mist that condenses into ice crystals. As she presses the blue diamond into the bronze statue's eye socket, the entire wall suddenly flips over, revealing a crystal cabinet embedded with test tubes. Embryos in various stages of development floated in each test tube, labeled to span twenty years, with a picture of Ethan's mother taped next to the most recent number.
The cryo alarm suddenly turned to a shrill wail, and Violet turned her head to see Ethan standing in the doorway with his gun raised but pointed at his temple, "You knew I was the only one of these embryos that survived the test."
The blue diamonds resonate eerily at this point, the cries of the embryos drilling through the infrasound into the bone marrow.Blood begins to seep from the rose tattoo behind Violet's ear, tattooed with a mixture of pigments from old Benson's ashes. She finally read the cryptic language on the prongs of the blue diamonds when Ethan's cloned cells suddenly burst into flames, wrapping around the vault door like red vines:
All Benson bloodlines will eventually die of the rose.
(End of chapter)
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Twin bodies are found in the morgue freezer, and while Lila's bail account suddenly has an extra 300 million dollars in it, Ethan's cloned serum is fetching a fortune on the black market. And right now on the Manhattan skyline, three pesticide planes loaded with rose seeds are slowly crossing the dawn ...