Chapter 3: The Lockbox

Chapter 3: The Lockbox

The Aethelred logo was a brand on his brain. The three-pronged helix, a perversion of life’s sacred code, spun behind his eyes every time he blinked. And with it, the string of characters projected by the shard of glass: AE-CHIM-734. It felt less like a serial number and more like a slave name.

Paranoia was a physical presence now, a cold weight on his shoulders. He’d spent the rest of the morning jumping at shadows, peering through the blinds every ten minutes. The black sedan was gone, but its absence was somehow more menacing than its presence. It meant they weren't just watching; they were mobile. They knew where he was.

He couldn’t stay here. He couldn’t run. Not yet. Not without understanding what he was running from. The answer, if it existed anywhere, had to be in this house. The attic had been a lie, a carefully staged piece of theatre designed to mislead. So where would his parents—the secretive, brilliant scientists he now knew them to be—hide the truth?

Not in a place of chaos, but in a place of order.

The home office.

It was his father’s sanctuary, a room where every book was alphabetized, every file labeled with his mother’s precise, elegant script. It smelled of old paper, leather, and logic. A stark contrast to the hollow lie of the attic. As Leo stepped inside, the constant, high-pitched hum in his ears, his personal static, seemed to quiet slightly, as if in deference to the room's rigid discipline.

He started frantically, pulling books from shelves, shaking them in the desperate hope that a hidden key or a folded note would fall out. Nothing. He opened desk drawers, sifting through pens, paperclips, and neatly bundled receipts. It was all maddeningly normal. The life of a history professor and his wife, a retired research consultant. A perfect, fabricated life.

He was beginning to despair when he started on the filing cabinets. Three tall, steel cabinets stood against the far wall, their drawers labeled with mundane categories: ‘Taxes,’ ‘Mortgage,’ ‘Appliance Warranties.’ He pulled open a drawer marked ‘Personal Correspondence.’ It was filled with letters from friends, birthday cards, postcards from their rare vacations. It was a perfect archive of their public-facing lives.

But as he slid the drawer shut, it resisted for a fraction of a second, catching with a faint thunk before closing smoothly.

Leo froze. He opened it again. Closed it. Thunk. It was almost imperceptible, a flaw in the otherwise flawless room. His heart hammered. He pulled the drawer all the way out, until it locked on its runners, and peered into the empty cavity of the cabinet. Nothing.

He ran his fingers along the bottom of the drawer. His nails scraped against a shallow groove near the back. A catch. He pressed it. A soft click echoed in the silent room, and the back panel of the drawer sagged slightly. A false bottom.

With trembling hands, he lifted the panel away.

Nestled in the hollow space beneath was a small, brutally simple box. It was made of dull, grey metal, about the size of a shoebox, with no discernible lock, only a single, seamless join running around its middle. He reached in and lifted it. It was shockingly heavy, far heavier than a box its size should be. The metal was cold to the touch. It felt dense, final. He recognized the material from a college physics class. Lead. Designed to block radiation. Or signals.

He carried it to the desk and set it down with a heavy, ominous thud. How to open it? There were no hinges, no keyholes, no combination dial. He ran his fingers over the seam, pressing, pulling. Nothing. It was a perfect, sealed unit.

Frustrated, he stared at the box, the code from the shard echoing in his mind. AE-CHIM-734. A designation. A key.

His eyes scanned the room, searching for a clue. He looked at the filing cabinet. AE… an acronym? No, too generic. CHIM… Chimera. His designation. 734… a number.

His gaze fell upon his father’s bookshelf, the section on ancient history. His father had been obsessed with the Greco-Roman period. Leo scanned the titles. The Histories by Herodotus. The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Then he saw it. A thick, leather-bound volume: Bibliotheca, the Library of History, by Diodorus Siculus.

734.

His father had once told him a story. The First Servile War, a slave rebellion against the Roman Republic. It was brutally crushed in the year 734 AUC, Ab Urbe Condita, from the founding of the city. A rebellion put down. A desperate, cautionary tale from a history professor to his unknowing son.

His hands shook as he took the book from the shelf. He fumbled through the dense pages, his fingers clumsy with adrenaline. Tucked into the chapter describing the final, bloody battle of the rebellion was a small, flat, metallic key, shaped like a stylized cog.

He returned to the desk. On the top of the lead-lined box, almost invisible against the dull metal, was a tiny, matching cog-shaped indentation. He inserted the key. It fit perfectly. With a turn, there was a heavy, satisfying clunk as internal mechanisms unlocked. The top half of the box lifted away.

The air inside was stale, sterile. There were only two items within.

The first was a thick, spiral-bound journal. He lifted it out. The cover was plain black cardboard. He opened it to the first page. It was his mother's handwriting, but not the neat, flowing script from the file labels. This was a rushed, dense scrawl, a mix of complex chemical formulas, wave-function equations, and genetic sequencing charts that made his head swim. The pages were filled with a complex cipher, symbols and abbreviations he couldn’t hope to understand. It was the work of a desperate genius.

But sprinkled throughout the code, like islands in a cryptic sea, were a few phrases written in plain, panicked English. He scanned the pages, his blood turning to ice.

…error in the baseline sequence. Subject Chimera exhibits dangerous levels of ontological instability…

…Finch is pushing the timeline. He doesn’t see the risk. He only sees the Key…

…synthesis with the xenomorphic sample is complete, but the resonance is… wrong. It listens. It learns…

…The escape plan is our only option. We have to get him out. He is not a project. He is my son…

Leo’s breath hitched. Subject Chimera. Ontological instability. The words from the television. His parents hadn’t been complicit cogs in the Aethelred machine. They had been saboteurs. They had stolen him. They had saved him. The weight of their sacrifice, the true depth of their love, hit him with the force of a physical blow.

He carefully placed the journal on the desk and reached for the second item in the box. It was a photograph, a standard 5x7 print.

It was the same photo he had seen on the television screen. A group of scientists in their white lab coats, smiling for the camera. In the center stood his mother, Dr. Aris Thorne, looking younger, more driven, a flicker of pride and fear in her hazel eyes. And standing next to her, one hand resting proprietorially on her shoulder, was the man whose cold gaze had haunted Leo’s childhood.

Dr. Alistair Finch.

The reclusive ‘family friend’. The man who brought him strange, complicated toys and never smiled with his eyes. The man whose visits always left his parents tense and quiet for days afterward. He wasn't a friend. He was a warden. A monster in a bespoke suit.

Leo stared at the face in the photograph, at the faint, cruel smile playing on his lips. This was the man who had overseen his creation. The man who had called him a ‘Subject.’ The man his mother was afraid of. The man who, in all likelihood, had ordered the ‘accident’ on that rain-slicked highway.

The hunt had a face now. The conspiracy had a name.

He had the journal, a book of secrets he couldn't read. And he had a photograph of the one man who could. His objective, sharp and deadly, solidified in his mind. He was no longer just a grieving son. He was the living evidence of a corporate crime, and his first move was clear.

He had to find Dr. Alistair Finch.