The ER froze when a fearsome biker burst through the doors, begging for help while carrying a dying child. But when her DNA was tested, the system collapsed—and the FBI sealed the hospital after discovering the girl officially did not exist.

Knox smiled without humor. “The people who shouldn’t exist, either.”

The lights flickered.

Once.

Twice.

Then the emergency generators kicked in, bathing the ER in dim red illumination that turned every shadow long and distorted, and for the first time in her career, Elaine felt the unmistakable sense that whatever she was standing in the middle of was no longer a medical emergency but something else entirely.

Knox hadn’t always been a nightmare on two wheels.

Once, he’d been a father.

Ten years earlier, his daughter Emily had vanished on her way home from school, a case that made local headlines for a week before quietly dissolving into nothing when leads dried up and the wrong people started asking the right questions. Knox learned quickly how easily children could fall through cracks big enough to swallow entire lives, and when the system failed him, he stopped trusting it altogether.

That was how he ended up riding alone through the back roads near the old Hawthorne Research Complex, a place officially listed as decommissioned but still humming faintly at night like a sleeping animal, its fences too well maintained for something supposedly abandoned.

That was where he found Ivy.