She typed:

“Thank you.”

August.

The clock struck midnight.

Over the next seventy-two hours, the “Safe-no: August” flag spread to 847 other samples. All sperm. All marked with the same chilling instruction: Do not use in August.

Lena raced to the cryo-bay. On the wall, a digital clock read:

The August Contingency

Marcus Thorne. The first flagged patient.

She yanked open the emergency purge panel. Her hands flew across the keyboard. But the system demanded a dual-authorization code—the other half of which had died with Voss.

She ran a diagnostic. The diagnostic ran a deep scan of Dr. Voss’s old encrypted notes. What it found made Lena’s blood run cold.

Lena frowned at the screen. She’d coded half the safety protocols herself. There was no “Safe-no” parameter.

But in August, the Vault went silent.