Tomás yanked his arm away, his chest tightening. “‘Catch it,’” he remembered the nurse’s words. Lili’s dying whisper in the ICU. Catch what?

“We’re taking him into custody,” Tomás told Mariana, pulling out his handcuffs. “Call the precinct. Have a transport unit pick him up. I’m going back to the hospital. Dr. Velázquez needs to hear this.”

The Clock is Ticking

Back at San Miguel General Hospital, the atmosphere had shifted from chaotic to clinical dread. The sterile scent of antiseptic couldn’t mask the underlying tension. When Tomás arrived, he found Dr. Cassandra Velázquez standing outside the glass partition of the pediatric ICU, staring at the monitors with a look of profound disbelief.

The digital readouts were a mess of spiking red lines. Lili’s heart rate was climbing, but her blood pressure was cratering. Inside the room, the little girl looked even smaller, swallowed by the massive array of tubes, ventilators, and sensors attached to her fragile body. But it was her abdomen that drew the eye—it seemed even larger now, the skin stretched so taut it looked translucent, revealing a terrifying web of dark, pulsing veins.

“What do the scans show?” Tomás asked, stepping up beside the doctor.

Dr. Velázquez didn’t look at him. She just tapped a manila folder against the counter. “We ran a contrast CT and a targeted ultrasound. Officer Reyes… I’ve spent nearly two decades dealing with tumors, teratomas, and rare congenital abnormalities. What is inside Lilia García defies every textbook printed in the last century.”

She opened the folder and slid out a series of black-and-white imaging sheets. She pointed a trembling pen at the center of Lili’s pelvic and abdominal cavity.

“A normal tumor is a mass of chaotic, unorganized cells,” Cassandra explained, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper. “But look at this. These aren’t chaotic cells. Do you see these dark, linear shadows radiating outward? Those are independent vascular pathways. Whatever this thing is, it hasn’t just grown inside her; it has actively engineered its own circulatory system. It is tapping directly into her abdominal aorta and her hepatic portal vein.”

Tomás squinted at the image. The mass didn’t look round like a typical tumor. It had segmented ridges, looking almost like a tightly coiled fist, or worse, a fetal position that wasn’t human. “You said it’s damaging her organs.”