All Chapters of Eternal Cage: King of Ash: Chapter 41
- Chapter 50
84 chapters
Chapter Forty-one
The Memory Vault wasn't marked. Just a bump on the ice. A concrete dome, half-buried. One steel door. No handles. No keypad. Just metal."This is it," Elena said. The wind ate her words. She had the emitter on her back now. A gray box. Looked stupid. Her mother was back on the boat. We just had guns. And us."How do we get in?" Kenji asked. He stared at the door.Borealis's notes said look north. A maintenance door. We found it. Smaller. Iced shut. Caiman dug at the ice with his knife. I worked the frozen lever. It cracked loud in the quiet.The door opened to a tunnel. Sloped down. Cold, but not outside cold. A dead cold. Smelled like nothing.We went in. Single file. Boots echoed. The tunnel ended at another door. It opened into the vault.Wasn't what I thought. No servers. No tanks. Just a round room. All white ceramic. Shiny. In the middle, a pedestal. A black crystal ball sat on it. Size of a head. Pulsed with a slow light. Data. All those minds, in that rock.The room was empty.
Chapter Forty-two
The snow wasn't falling anymore. It was just grit in the air, little bits of ice that sandblasted your face if you looked the wrong way. Elena pulled the hood of her parka tighter. The fur around the edge was stiff with frozen breath. She lifted the night-vision monocular to her eye. The world went green and black.The facility wasn't much to look at. From two kilometers out, it was just lumps under the snow. Like someone had buried a few buses and forgot about them. One security camera dome, black glass, turning slow. That was it. No fence. No towers. Just white, and wind, and that one stupid eye watching nothing.But she knew. The stolen schematics were printed on the back of her eyelids. Sub-level one: where the guards slept and ate. Sub-level two: labs. Sub-level three: storage. Sub-level four: the Nursery. That word sat in her gut like a cold stone.She lowered the monocular. Her fingers were numb blocks inside her gloves. Her mother’s notes, the broken data, the whispers from th
Chapter Forty-three
The air in the Dubai lab tasted like burnt sugar and ozone. My shoulder was a knot of pain where a bullet had grazed it. Kenji was bleeding from a cut above his eye, the blood mixing with sweat and grime. Caiman was just a wall of heaving muscle next to me, a piece of rebar bent in his hands like a cheap spoon.We stood in the control room of the Burj Khalifa’s secret heart. The last lab. Or the latest one. I’d lost count.In front of us, on the main console, a countdown glowed in cool, digital green: 02:17… 02:16…We’d fought our way up the private elevator shaft, through two floors of Gen-2 guards who moved like wind-up toys. We found this room empty. Just the hum of machines and that timer.A system-wide purge. Initiated remotely.Screens showed the lab floors below. Tanks. Rows and rows of them, each holding a blurry shape in slow-moving fluid. Gen-3s. Blanks. And in the central chamber, one big tube. Inside, something almost done. A perfect, muscular body. No face yet. Just a smo
Chapter Forty-four
The server vault door hissed shut behind us, cutting off the sounds of the firefight. The sudden quiet was worse. It was the quiet of a tomb.We were in a tight huddle – me, Kenji, Caiman. Elena stood a few feet apart, the gray emitter box still on her back like a weird camping gear. Her three defectors were against the far wall. Mikal, the jumpy one. Liv, with the burned face. And the kid, Kael, who looked like he was trying not to pee himself.The room was small, all blinking lights and the low hum of machines. One way in. No way out. We were all holding guns, and nobody was pointing them at the floor.The silence stretched. Too long.“So,” I said. My voice sounded too loud. “You’re the help.”Mikal’s eyes darted from my face to Kenji’s to Caiman’s. He saw the blood, the busted knuckles, the look in our eyes that said we were about three seconds from solving this problem the old way. “We got you the data,” he said, his voice tight. “We got you in.”“You got us trapped,” Kenji correc
Chapter Forty-five
The power cut worked.One second we were in the dark server room listening to gunfire echo through the walls. The next, the shooting got louder. More confused. Shouting in the hall. Then the sound of boots running away from us, toward where they came in.We waited five minutes. Felt like five hours.Liv cracked the door first. "Clear. They pulled back."We moved into the hallway. The emergency lights were dead. Just our tactical beams cutting through the smoke. Thick stuff. Chemical. Burned your throat to breathe it."The Nursery," Elena said. "We need to see what they left behind."I didn't argue. We followed her.The Nursery was on sub-level four. We took the stairs. Everything was quiet now. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that makes you want to yell just to hear something.The door to the Nursery was blown open. Not by us. The frame was bent outward, like something had pushed from inside. We stepped through.Big room. Circular. In the middle, rows of tanks. Not the big growth chamber
Chapter Forty-six
The cabin was a gift we didn’t earn.Somebody’s dead grandfather’s hunting lodge. Tucked in a fold of the Norwegian mountains where the satellites don’t bother looking. Liv knew about it. Old resistance safe house from before the project went completely dark. She said it hadn’t been used in years.She wasn’t lying.The place smelled like dust and mice. Mouse shit in all the corners. A wood stove that probably hadn’t been lit since the 90s. Three small rooms. One toilet that groaned like a dying animal every time you pulled the chain.It was the best place I’d ever slept.We got the kids inside first. The portable cradles were heavy and awkward. Caiman carried two at once. Kenji carried the third like it was made of glass and he was scared he’d drop it.We set them up in the biggest room. Pushed the moldy couch against the wall. Laid the cradles in a row on the floor. Elena checked their vitals, adjusted the sedative drips. Her hands were steady but her face was gray and hollow.“They
Chapter Forty-seven
The cabin went quiet after we agreed to split up.Not peaceful quiet. The heavy kind. The kind where everyone’s doing the math in their head. Who’s likely to die. Who won’t make it back. Who’ll be left to deal with whatever’s left behind.I couldn’t sit there with it. So I went outside. The cold helped. It gave my body something else to think about.This time it wasn’t Kenji who followed.It was Elena.She stood a few feet away, arms folded tight across her chest. Looking at the trees. Not at me.“You should be inside,” I said. “With your mom.”“She’s not going anywhere.” Her voice was flat. “The machine’s doing everything now.”There wasn’t much to say to that.We stood there.After a while she spoke again.“She opened her eyes earlier,” Elena said. “Not fully. But she looked at me.”“Yeah?”“She tried to talk. Couldn’t. But she moved her hand.” Elena lifted her own hand slowly. “Like she was trying to reach for something.”I waited.“She wrote on the wall,” she said. “With her finge
Chapter Forty-eight
The safe house was an old farmhouse about forty klicks south of the cabin. Sat low in a valley where the snow didn’t hit as hard. Resistance had fixed it up years back. Stocked it. Left it ready in case someone needed to disappear fast.Mikal chose it. Said it was good enough for the kids. Liv agreed. Kael didn’t argue. Just started hauling supplies inside.Plan was simple. Drop them off. Make sure they had heat, food, someone steady. Then we leave. Back to the Marlin. Back to the fight.That was the plan.Then the kids started talking.Maja still didn’t say much. Mostly watched. But it wasn’t fear. It was focus. Like she was studying the world. Taking notes.Lars stayed close to Borealis. Didn’t speak unless spoken to. But when he did, it was always a question. He wanted things to make sense.And the youngest. Brother. He followed Kenji without saying why. Didn’t need to. Just needed to be close.Then, for whatever reason, the three of them came looking for me.Late afternoon. I was
Chapter Forty-nine
We had left the cabin in the valley three days ago when the call came in.The Marlin was moving east through flat gray water. The sky looked the same. No sun. Just cold light sitting on everything. Borealis was downstairs with his screens, trying to line up the Odyssey coordinates with satellite maps. Caiman stood at the front of the boat, watching pieces of ice drift past. Kenji sat near the rail, running a cloth over his knife again and again.I was just there. Not thinking. Not really.The sat phone buzzed.A different number. Not our usual line. Secure. The kind that erases itself after.I answered.“Jax.” Mikal. His voice was tight. Not shaky. Just tight. “You need to hear this.”He didn’t explain. Just pushed the audio through.Static.Then a man’s voice. Calm. Almost bored.“…facility designated Aurora is confirmed lost. All personnel unaccounted for. Genetic assets presumed destroyed or compromised. Initiate Omega Protocol.”A short pause.A woman. Older.“Omega requires board
Chapter Fifty
The farmhouse was quiet when we got back.Should've been the first sign.We'd been gone four days. Hit a small relay station up in the mountains, knocked out their transmitter, made it look like an avalanche. Nothing special. The kind of job we could do in our sleep by now.Coming back though. Something felt off.The Marlin dropped us on the shore at dawn. We hiked in through the trees, same path as always. Fresh snow covered our old tracks. Everything looked normal.Too normal.Kenji stopped first. Held up his fist. We all froze.He pointed at the treeline ahead. At the birds. Or the lack of them. No movement. No sound. Just dead quiet.I signaled Caiman. He went left, disappeared into the pines. Borealis went right, slow and careful. Kenji and I took the middle.We moved up on the farmhouse slowly. Real slow.The door was open.Not broken. Just open. Like someone walked out and forgot to close it behind them.Kenji had his knife out. I had my rifle up. We came to the porch from both