Chapter 6: The Lazarus Progeny

Chapter 6: The Lazarus Progeny

The digital world was a fortress, and Sarah Vance was laying siege. For three days, she had barely slept, fueled by black coffee and a cold, crystalline rage. Her pristine apartment had transformed into a command center. Printouts of property records and financial documents were scattered across her glass coffee table, and her laptop screen was a mosaic of open tabs, dead-end search queries, and password-protected portals.

The police had been a dead end. Ethan’s car had not been flagged by any traffic cameras, and without evidence of a crime beyond a frantic, unsubstantiated claim, her case was quickly relegated to the bottom of the pile. She was on her own.

Her entire focus was the email. Project Lazarus. Genesis Clinic. Ad Astra Per Corpora.

The Genesis Clinic was a ghost. Its website was a single, sterile landing page demanding credentials she didn’t have. There were no public-facing addresses, no phone numbers, no corporate filings she could find. It was a digital black hole. But Sarah’s mind, honed by years of managing complex projects with a thousand moving parts, refused to attack the problem head-on. If the fortress walls were impenetrable, you didn’t keep hammering at the gate. You looked for the people who had the key.

Inquiry #734. That number had haunted her. It implied at least 733 others. 733 other grieving, desperate people who might have been tempted by an impossible promise. She began a new, more lateral search, cross-referencing the clinic’s name with terms a desperate parent would use: “unconventional grief therapy,” “child loss support,” “genetic memory.”

For hours, she waded through a digital ocean of sorrow—forums for bereaved parents, blogs filled with heartbreaking tributes, support groups that felt like open wounds. Then, she found it. A single comment, buried deep within the archives of a defunct mental health message board, dated four years ago. The post had been deleted, but the cached preview in her search engine results gave her just enough.

User: AFinch78 Subject: Re: Unethical Practices …stay away from any program calling itself ‘Genesis.’ They prey on the grieving. It’s not therapy, it’s a lie that takes everything you have left. My life is ruined. They gave me back a monster…

The link was dead, the full post gone, but she had a username. AFinch78. It was a thin thread, but it was the only one she had. An hour of cross-referencing public records and social media profiles gave her a name: Arthur Finch. An address in a faded, middle-class suburb an hour outside the city. A former accountant whose professional license had lapsed three years prior. A man who had lost a seven-year-old daughter, Lily, to a brain aneurysm five years ago. The timeline was perfect.

She was in her car twenty minutes later.

Arthur Finch lived in a house that was actively surrendering to decay. The lawn was a knee-high tangle of weeds, and grey paint was peeling from the siding in long, curling strips. When he answered the door, he looked like the house’s human equivalent. He was a man hollowed out from the inside, his eyes a toxic cocktail of fear and exhaustion.

“Whatever you’re selling, I’m not interested,” he rasped, his hand already moving to close the door.

“Mr. Finch,” Sarah said, her voice steady and clear, planting a foot on the threshold. “My name is Sarah Vance. I need to talk to you about the Genesis Clinic.”

A flicker of raw panic lit his eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“They took my son,” Sarah said, the words tasting like poison and truth. “Ten years ago, he drowned. Two nights ago, my ex-husband showed up with a five-year-old boy. It was him, Mr. Finch. It was his face. He had the scar on his hand.”

Arthur stopped trying to close the door. He stared at her, his mouth agape. He wasn't seeing a stranger anymore; he was seeing a fellow survivor of the same shipwreck, washed up on the same impossible shore.

“You saw it?” he whispered. “The copy?”

“I saw him,” Sarah insisted, pushing her way inside. The house smelled of dust and stale air. “I need to know what they are. Who they are.”

Arthur led her into a dim living room where the curtains were drawn tight against the afternoon sun. He collapsed into a worn armchair, his body trembling.

“You think it’s a clinic,” he said, his voice a broken, bitter laugh. “That’s what they want you to think. A cutting-edge, scientific venture. It’s a good story. A comforting one.”

“What is it, then?”

He leaned forward, his eyes wide and feverish. “It’s a cult. A religion. They call themselves The Lazarus Progeny. Genesis Clinic is just one of their… their recruitment arms.”

The name sent a chill down Sarah’s spine. It was grand, biblical, and utterly insane. “A cult? What do they want?”

“Everything,” Arthur said. “They’ve been around for centuries, in one form or another. They’re not scientists; they’re high priests in lab coats. They believe that certain ancient, non-human intelligences were trapped on Earth millennia ago. Formless, voiceless things. The Progeny believes it is their sacred duty to provide them with new vessels. To give them a second chance at life.”

Sarah felt a wave of nausea. “Vessels? What are you talking about?”

“The children,” Arthur choked out, a sob catching in his throat. “They don't clone them. Not really. Cloning is just the bait. It’s how they create the perfect, empty host. A body with a familiar face, a blank slate, bio-engineered to be… receptive. They don't bring our children back, Ms. Vance. They just open the door and let something else in.”

He pointed a shaking finger at her. “That motto they use? Ad Astra Per Corpora? I thought it meant we could reach the stars through the body of our loved ones. It doesn’t. It means they reach our world through the body. It’s a key for the passenger.”

The memory of Leo’s vacant, observant stare, his unnatural stillness in the cabin, flashed through Ethan’s mind, but Sarah could only picture the impossible face in the car window. Her mission had been to find the copy of her son. Now, she was being told that she was hunting a monster wearing his skin.

“My daughter,” Arthur whispered, his gaze drifting toward a closed door at the end of the hallway. “Lily. I got her back two years ago. For the first month, it was perfect. She was perfect. And then… the changes began. Little things. She’d hum for hours. A single, awful note that made the fillings in my teeth ache. She stopped playing. She just… watched.”

He stood up, his movements stiff, like an old man. “You need to see. You need to understand what you’re really dealing with.”

He led her to the closed door and pushed it open. The room inside was a child’s bedroom, painted a soft pink, but it was a museum of a life that was over. A layer of dust covered the dolls on the shelves. In the center of the room, a nine-year-old girl sat on the floor. She had soft blonde hair and a pale, angelic face. She was not humming. She was holding her hands out in front of her, her small fingers tracing intricate, invisible patterns in the air, over and over, with a look of serene, absolute concentration. She didn’t blink. She didn’t acknowledge their presence. She was a beautiful, hollow shell, performing a silent, endless ritual.

“They told me this was Phase Two,” Arthur said, his voice devoid of all hope. “The awakening. The Echo settling into its new home. They’re not bringing back the dead, Ms. Vance. They are birthing gods into the bodies of our children.”

Sarah backed away, her heart hammering against her ribs. She looked from the hollow-eyed girl tracing symbols in the air to the broken man who was her jailer. She wasn't just chasing a distraught ex-husband anymore. She was moving against a conspiracy centuries old, one with unimaginable resources and a faith that treated her son’s body as a holy grail for an alien entity.

Her grief for Leo was a distant ache now, eclipsed by a new and far more profound terror. She had to find them. Not just to save the image of her son, but to confront the horrifying thing that was looking out from behind his eyes.