The Tethered Pulse

1 My heartbeat was unnaturally steady. It was almost inhuman. Whether I was sleeping, running a fever, or losing blood, my heart rate barely fluctuated. At eighteen, I was brought into the Vanguard Medical Institute by the Vance family, confined to the climate-controlled penthouse suite. Not because Elias Vance loved me. But because the one-of-a-kind neuro-bionic heart in his chest needed my heartbeat as its source frequency to calibrate. If I was steady, he lived. If my heart raced, he died. Three months ago, a nurse accidentally peeled off one of my biosensor patches. Five minutes later, half a world away, Elias’s heart stopped. The next day, the subcontracting medical firm went bankrupt, and every staff member involved was permanently blacklisted from the industry. From then on, even the elevator chimes on the top floor were muted. That was, until Elias flew to Geneva for a corporate merger, and his fiancée, Vanessa Sterling, took over the institute. She flipped through my nine-figure annual medical expenses and sneered. "The Vance family is paying hundreds of millions a year just to keep a useless, breathing vegetable alive?" She ripped off my biosensor patches, yanked out my sync cables, and shoved me onto a treadmill. "Six miles. You aren't going back to the penthouse until you finish." I gripped the handrails, my heartbeat racing wildly for the first time in my life, pounding so hard it felt like my ribs would shatter. The moment the alarm blared, she slammed the mute button. She had no idea. Twelve time zones away, Elias’s bionic heart was spiraling out of control right along with mine. Within three seconds, the treadmill belt accelerated from a slow walk to a full sprint. Two security guards grabbed my arms, pinning me to the handrails so I couldn't step off. The skin on my chest, where the sensor patches had been violently ripped away, burned like fire. "Turn the speed up." Vanessa stood outside the glass wall, arms crossed, watching the show. A nurse turned pale. "Ms. Sterling, she can't handle strenuous exercise—" "The Vance family spends a fortune keeping this heartbeat alive. Let’s see just how precious it really is." The speed cranked up to a level ten. My knees smashed against the edge of the belt. My vision went black. The main alarms shattered the silence. [Warning: Heart rate anomalous. Source frequency unstable. Remote sync critical.] I gripped the rails, my knuckles turning white, my voice torn apart by my gasping breath. "You can't... you can't disconnect the sync cables." Vanessa walked in and leaned close to my face. "Still acting?" A stack of annual billing reports was slapped across my face. Incubator maintenance, elite medical team salaries, imported experimental drugs, independent servers. The dollar amount next to each item was staggering. She picked up a page and read it aloud: "One hundred and thirty million dollars a year." "What value have you ever brought to the Vance family?" "Nothing. All you know how to do is lie there and breathe." Cold sweat dripped down my temples. My heart felt like it was being squeezed in a vice. It wasn't that my heart was weak. It was that once my heart rate lost control, Elias's bionic heart in Europe would crash right along with it. "Ms. Sterling, if you stop now, it's not too late." She slapped me hard across the face. The taste of copper filled my mouth. Nurse Maya rushed forward, grabbing a backup sensor patch. "Harper can't run anymore!" Vanessa shot her a lethal glare, and the guards violently shoved Maya away. The sensor patch was tossed into the trash can. "You're suspended. Say one more word, and you will never work in medicine again." Maya froze in place, terrified to move. When the treadmill finally stopped, my legs gave out, and I collapsed directly onto the floor. The suffocating pain in my chest pulsed stronger with every second, but the blaring alarms abruptly died. Vanessa had shut off the main alert screen. The room fell dead silent. The only sound left was my erratic, broken breathing. She glanced up toward the penthouse and smiled maliciously. "Go. Search her suite from top to bottom." "I want to see what kind of trash the Vance family has been burning their money on." Two corporate lawyers and a team of guards immediately headed to the top floor. By the time I was dragged back up, my room had been completely ransacked. The climate-controlled pod was pried open, backup vials of medicine were scattered across the floor, and the safe by my bed had been forced open. One of the lawyers walked over to Vanessa holding a stack of papers. "Ms. Sterling, we found it." Vanessa took the papers, scanned them, and the corners of her lips curled up. "Kickback agreements from medical equipment suppliers." She pulled out a few more sheets. "Offshore wire transfer receipts." She looked down at me, her eyes gleaming with the triumph of a victor. "Harper, what do you have to say for yourself?" I looked at those documents, and a sudden urge to laugh bubbled up in my throat. Those papers weren't mine. But right now, I didn't even have the strength to stand. Vanessa had already played judge, jury, and executioner. "Colluding with suppliers, embezzling Vanguard's medical resources, and faking an illness to siphon a multi-million dollar medical fund." She smacked the documents against my cheek. "As of right now, Harper's penthouse privileges are revoked." "Transfer her to a general observation ward." I forced my head up. "No." The sync environment on the top floor couldn't be broken. The climate control, the soundproofing, the dedicated servers, the sensors—not a single one could be disconnected. But Vanessa just assumed I was finally scared. "What? You can't survive without your luxury suite?" She leaned down and pinched my chin hard. "Then go ahead and die." As I was dragged out of the room, the main control screen in the institute suddenly flashed a blinding, violent red. [Source Frequency Lost.] [Remote Bionic Heart Sync Critical.] [Emergency Contact: Elias Vance.] Vanessa glanced at it, completely expressionless, and reached out her hand. Click. She shut down the entire emergency grid. At that exact moment, in a high-rise boardroom in Geneva. Elias Vance was looking down, signing a massive acquisition contract. His fountain pen hit the paper, then suddenly jerked, tearing a jagged line across the page. A second later, the bionic heart in his chest emitted a piercing, high-pitched warning siren. 2 The general observation ward was on the third floor. No soundproof walls. No climate-control systems. I curled into a ball on the stiff hospital bed, my fingers digging into the cheap sheets, my chest so tight I couldn't make a sound. The door burst open. Dr. Nolan rushed in, his lab coat unbuttoned, his face pale with panic. He was Elias's chief physician and the only person in the institute who knew the entire truth. When he saw the empty space on my chest where the monitor patch was supposed to be, the blood drained from his face. "Who authorized the removal of her biosensors?!" Vanessa sat on the vinyl sofa, casually flipping through my medical file without even looking up. "Dr. Nolan, I am the acting director of this facility." She pushed a Board of Directors authorization letter onto the table. "While Elias is away, Vanguard Medical answers to me." Nolan didn't even glance at it. He sprinted straight toward me. "Harper cannot stay in this room." He reached out to hook me up to a portable sync monitor, but two guards instantly blocked his path. Nolan roared, "Get out of my way!" Vanessa stood up. "Why so tense? She's a criminal under investigation for medical fraud, yet you're protecting her more fiercely than Elias does." Nolan ground his teeth together. He couldn't say it. The fact that Elias's bionic heart relied on my frequency was Vanguard's highest-level corporate secret. If word got out, Elias would instantly become a walking target for every rival on Wall Street. Nolan could only force the words out through a tight jaw: "Her sync cannot be broken. If something happens to her, Mr. Vance will die." Vanessa laughed out loud. "If something happens to Harper, Elias is in danger?" She walked over to my bed and stared down at me. "You're quite the mastermind, getting the chief of medicine to lie for you." I opened my mouth, but the crushing pain in my chest stopped me from forming a single word. The last trace of color left Nolan's face. "Ms. Sterling, this is your last warning. If you stop now, I can still fix this." "Fix this?" Vanessa's smile was icy. "What needs fixing is the millions she's stolen from this institute." She pointed a perfectly manicured finger at Nolan. "Confiscate his badge." The guards pinned Nolan and dragged him toward the door. "Vanessa! You are going to regret this!" Vanessa ignored him and turned to the Head of IT. "The backup sync server on the top floor. Is it still running?" The IT director's face twisted in horror. "Ms. Sterling, we cannot shut that down! It transmits the calibration parameters to Mr. Vance's remote bionic heart. If we cut it—" "Elias again." Vanessa's eyes darkened with absolute venom. "Every single one of you tries to use his name to control me." She grabbed her walkie-talkie. "Shut it down." The IT director lunged forward to stop it, but a guard kicked him to the floor. A few minutes later, the lights in the entire building flickered. The heart monitor next to my bed erupted into static, and my heart rate line went completely erratic. I clawed at my chest, arching off the bed as violent convulsions ripped through my body. Outside the door, Nolan was pinned to the floor, the veins in his neck bulging as he screamed. "Vanessa! He's going to die! Elias is actually going to die!" Vanessa stood at the foot of my bed, watching me seize, completely unfazed. "Then let me see you die." Her cell phone started ringing. The caller ID displayed an encrypted number. The location tag read: Geneva. She answered it. The voice of Elias's executive assistant was completely hysterical. "Ms. Sterling! Mr. Vance just collapsed in the middle of a board meeting! His heart went into forced-survival mode! Did something happen at the institute—" Vanessa's expression faltered for a fraction of a second. She looked down at me. I was drenched in cold sweat, my breathing snapping into broken, jagged gasps. The brief hesitation in her eyes vanished, replaced once again by mockery. "You guys really committed to this act, didn't you?" The assistant was screaming through the speaker: "Ms. Sterling?! Are you there?!" She hung up. Powered off the phone. And tossed it into her designer bag. "Elias is surrounded by the best medical team in Europe. He doesn't need a lying parasite to save his life." I lay on the hard mattress, listening to my own heartbeat drag me down, down, down into the dark. 3 By the time I was shoved into the examination room, my fingers were shaking uncontrollably. They slapped ice-cold electrode patches onto my skin. The waveform on the monitor was a chaotic mess. Nolan was pinned outside the glass door, his white coat covered in dirt, his eyes locked onto me. "Harper, hold on." I tried to twitch my lips into a smile, but I couldn't. It felt like a thousand invisible wires were wrapping tightly around my chest, pulling tighter by the second. The old Institute Director arrived, his hair completely disheveled. He rushed up to Vanessa, shoving a tablet in her face. The screen displayed two sets of data—my heart rate waveform, and the remote operational logs of Elias's bionic heart. The timestamps, the erratic spikes, the frequencies—they matched perfectly. The Director's voice was trembling. "From the exact second you ripped off Harper's monitor patch, Mr. Vance's sync failed." "When you shut down the backup server, he fainted for the first time." "Now that Harper's heart rate is continuously unstable, Mr. Vance's artificial heart has entered critical failure mode." Vanessa's face finally darkened. But a moment later, she scoffed. "Data can be faked." The Director froze. Vanessa tossed the tablet onto a nearby table. "This entire institute is on Elias's payroll. If you all want to cover for Harper's fraud, fabricating a chart is child's play." "Ms. Sterling, this is a matter of life and death!" the Director pleaded. "Which is exactly why I need to get to the truth." Vanessa turned around and ordered a lawyer to hand her a document. She shoved a pen into my shaking hand. "Sign it." I forced my eyes to focus on the paper. Declaration of Voluntary Confession to Medical Fraud and Embezzlement of Resources. It stated that for years, I had faked a medical condition and colluded with the doctors to steal millions from Vanguard Medical. I let out a dry, rasping laugh. My throat felt like it was lined with sandpaper. "Vanessa." She glared at me. I forced my head up, looking her dead in the eye. "You aren't punishing me." "You are personally destroying Elias's heart." Her expression turned completely glacial. "Still threatening me?" I gripped the pen, my fingertips trembling so violently I could barely hold it. "I'm not threatening you. I'm trying to save his life." Vanessa leaned down, viciously grabbing my wrist. The pen tip tore through the paper, slicing into the pad of my finger. "You? Save him? What the hell do you think you are?" "What Elias needs is a world-class medical team and the most advanced bionic technology on the planet." "Not some pathetic piece of trash dragged out of an orphanage." She let go of me and snapped at a nurse. "Give her a stimulant." The nurse turned deathly pale, too terrified to move. The Director threw himself forward. "You can't! Her baseline frequency is already in chaos. A stimulant will trigger total cardiac collapse!" Vanessa grabbed the syringe herself and walked up to me. "You love pretending to be sick? Let's see just how steady that miracle heartbeat of yours really is." The moment the needle pierced my vein, my entire body went rigid. The icy liquid rushed into my bloodstream. Seconds later, it felt like my heart had been dropped into boiling oil. Thump-thump-thump. I could hear my heartbeat completely lose its rhythm, thrashing so violently it threatened to break my ribs. The monitors shrieked. The Director lunged at her but was tackled by security. Outside the glass, Nolan fought like a madman, his eyes bloodshot. "Vanessa! You're out of your mind!" I slid out of the examination chair, my knees crashing into the floor, but I couldn't even feel the pain. My vision faded in and out of darkness. In my delirium, I remembered the very first time Elias Vance came to see me. He was in a wheelchair, his face pale, his chest covered in wires and tubes. The doctors told him my heartbeat could keep him alive. But he just looked at me and asked, "Are you willing to do this?" I was so young back then. I asked him, "What if I'm not?" He was quiet for a long time before replying, "Then we let it go." But I stayed. Because that day, even though he was dying, he refused to force me. And now, someone else was forcing me to die in his place. At that exact moment, in a Geneva ER. Elias Vance forced his eyes open. A doctor leaned in to strap an oxygen mask over his face, but Elias violently ripped it away. His chest heaved erratically, the piercing alarm of his bionic heart deafening inside the trauma room. His assistant leaned over. "Mr. Vance, you cannot move!" Elias's voice was a ragged growl. "Prep the jet." "We're going back." 4 By the time Vanessa convened her disciplinary hearing, I could no longer stand. I was wheeled into the grand auditorium on the ground floor. It was packed. Board members, corporate lawyers, head nurses, the chief of security, and compliance regulators she had called in. Every eye was on me—pity, scrutiny, disgust. Vanessa stood at the front podium, her makeup flawless, her designer dress impeccable. I was wearing a hospital gown soaked in cold sweat. The skin below my collarbone was raw, blistered, and bleeding where the patches had been repeatedly ripped away. She turned on the projector. "I called you all here today to resolve an ugly scandal that has plagued this institute for years." The screen flashed with the fake kickback agreements and offshore wire transfers. Her voice rang out clearly: "Harper. An orphan. Not a Vanguard employee. Not a medical researcher." "Yet she has permanently occupied the highest-tier penthouse suite, hoarding millions in elite private medical resources." "Our preliminary investigation proves she colluded with medical suppliers, fabricated a terminal condition, and embezzled corporate funds." Murmurs erupted through the crowd. "No wonder she's always on the top floor." "I heard she doesn't even do anything. She just lies in bed all day." "Did Mr. Vance get conned by her?" I kept my eyes lowered. I didn't say a word. Explaining was useless. Vanessa didn't want the truth; she wanted a conviction. She looked at a row of nurses. "Tell the board. What exactly does Harper do in the penthouse all day?" The Head Nurse stood up first. She glanced nervously at Vanessa and murmured, "Ms. Harper doesn't participate in any clinical trials or treatments." Another nurse chimed in: "She spends most of the day resting. Her diet, environment, and medications are all strictly managed by a private team." A third was more blunt: "None of us understand why she gets to use equipment worth tens of millions of dollars." Outside the auditorium doors, Nurse Maya was being restrained by two guards. She was crying hysterically. "That's not true! Harper's monitor data is directly linked to Mr. Vance's internal system!" Before she could finish, they dragged her away. Vanessa smiled in satisfaction. "You all heard it for yourselves." I slowly raised my head, looking at the faces of the people testifying against me. I memorized every single one. Not for revenge. But because I was afraid that after I died, no one would ever know what they did here today. Suddenly, there was a commotion at the door. Dr. Nolan was shoved into the room. His face was bruised, his eyes entirely bloodshot, but his gaze snapped instantly to me. "Harper!" Vanessa smiled. "Perfect timing, Dr. Nolan." She pointed directly at my collarbone. "Dr. Nolan, didn't you previously claim that Harper has a core Vanguard medical chip embedded in her chest?" Nolan's face changed. "She didn't steal it." "That is a biometric sync chip, personally authorized and implanted by Mr. Vance. It cannot be removed." "And who takes responsibility if it is?" That was exactly what Vanessa was waiting for. She turned to face the crowd. "Did you hear that?" "A non-employee is harboring Vanguard's highest-clearance medical chip inside her own body." "This is no longer simple fraud. This is corporate espionage and the theft of proprietary core tech." Nolan roared, "Vanessa! That chip connects to—" "Gag him." The guards instantly clamped a hand over Nolan's mouth and pinned him down. Vanessa walked down the aisle, stopping right in front of my wheelchair. She leaned down, gently fixing my disheveled collar with a mockingly tender touch. "Harper, I gave you a chance." "You refused to confess." She raised her hand. "Extract the chip right now. Send it to legal for analysis." My pupils dilated. "No." For the first time, I actually fought back, thrashing in the chair. "Vanessa, that chip cannot leave my body." Vanessa pinned my shoulder down. "Scared now?" I gasped for air, my lungs burning. "He's already on his way." Vanessa froze for a second, then laughed. "Even if Elias comes back, he'll only thank me for exterminating a parasite like you." I was dragged out of the wheelchair and slammed onto a surgical chair. No anesthesia. Nolan was gagged, his eyes wide with absolute terror, practically tearing at the seams. When the cold steel of the scalpel pressed against my collarbone, my entire body went rigid. The first incision sliced through my skin. Blood instantly spilled out. The agony exploded through my chest, and I bit down on my lip so hard I tasted copper. The forceps dug into the open wound, clamping onto the sync chip buried deep beneath the tissue. Every monitor in the auditorium instantly flashed a violent, flashing red. [Warning: Source Frequency Severed.] [Remote Bionic Heart Total Failure Imminent.] Vanessa didn't even glance at the screens. She stared right into my eyes and violently yanked the chip out. In that split second, my vision went completely black. But right before I lost consciousness, I heard the heavy double doors of the auditorium crash open. Someone was pushing a wheelchair into the room. Elias Vance sat in the chair, his face as white as a sheet of paper. His eyes locked onto the gaping, bleeding wound on my chest. A fraction of a second later, the alarm on his bionic heart shrieked at a deafening pitch. He clutched his chest and tumbled out of the wheelchair. Crashing to the floor, right at Vanessa's feet.