The Tethered Pulse
Language: en
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…