2026-02-08 18:13:52
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Chapter Forty
The door was shut. The timer blinked. We stood there too long."Go!" I yelled.We ran. Back through red halls. Past the dead Gen-2 fixers. To the crack of light at the main door. My hip burned where they cut me. Kenji limped. Caiman was just a big hurt thing moving.Hit the cold air as the mountain groaned.Not a bang. A deep crack. Like the world snapping. Then a rumble. Snow on the cliffs jumped. Slid. A white wave ate the door, the walls. Ground shook. We ran. Stumbled. Out on the flat ice. Turned.The mountain ate itself. A cloud of snow and dust. Then settled. Where the door was, just a scar. Black rock. Avalanche mess. Quiet came back. The place was gone. Buried. Borealis with it.Elena fell to her knees in snow. Not crying. Just empty.Kenji looked at the burial. Face blank. "He bought the time.""Yeah," I said. Voice rough.Caiman stared. Said nothing.We walked back to the Marlin. No talk. Crew saw our faces. Saw we were one short. Asked nothing.Down in the lab, Dr. Aris hov
Chapter Thirty-nine
The Marlin was a quiet boat. The crew looked at us like we were ghosts. Bad luck. They’d lost friends back in the mountain. We hadn’t lost anything new. Dr. Aris did the cut in the sick bay. It hurt. A deep, digging pain in my hip. I didn’t yell. Kenji watched from the door. Face like stone.Done. Aris put the sample in a little box that hummed. “Need twelve hours. To grow cells. To tune the machine.”“No,” I said, pulling my pants up. The bandage was already red. “Voss is moving. The Phoenix is waking up. We wait, she’s gone.”“What then?” Kenji asked.I looked at Elena. She leaned in the doorway, arms crossed. She knew. “We sink the place. For good. Not a lock. We drop the mountain on it. The heat vents… blow them right, the whole thing cracks. Bury it all.”“How?” Caiman’s voice from the hall. He filled the space. “Poison air.”“Cleared,” Borealis said, quiet. He sat on a cot, pale. “Scrubbers are on. It’s air now. Just… empty.”“Gen-2s left?” Elena asked.“Some,” I said. “Fixers.
Chapter Thirty-eight
The wind in that crack in the ice was murder. It didn't blow, it stabbed. Got right in through the tears in your clothes, found the cuts, made everything hurt worse. We were shoved under a little rock ledge, just enough to block the worst of it. The soldier, Vogt, was shaking like a leaf. Not from cold. Shock. Borealis was trying to work his pad, his fingers blue and stiff. The rest of us just sat. Breathed. Tried to think of what to do next that didn't end with us as ice statues.Elena moved first. She crawled over to Vogt. Wasn't gentle. She slapped his cheek. Not hard, but sharp. "Hey. Your Colonel. He had a backup. A meet-up spot. Where?"Vogt blinked. Looked at her. "I... I don't...""He didn't walk in there without a way out," she said, voice flat. "A camp. A boat. Something. Where?"He swallowed. "Three miles east. Coast. A hidden crack in the cliffs. A ship. The Marlin.""Can you get us there?"He looked at us. At the things that got his friends killed. Then he nodded. It was
Chapter Thirty-seven
The standoff with Rahim didn't last long. We didn't have time for a long talk. Kenji and Caiman came up from the arena, bloody and walking slow. Borealis limped behind them. They saw Rahim's soldiers holding the control room, saw the looks on our faces.Rahim laid it out. "This facility is now under joint task force control. The nursery will be preserved for study. The genetic material is a strategic asset.""No," I said. Simple."You are in no position""We just killed thirty Gen-2s. We're in the perfect position." I took a step forward. His soldiers tensed. "You have maybe ten men. We're four. But we're four of us. You saw what that means. You want to spend your men finding out?"He didn't blink. "You would die too.""Been there," Kenji said flatly, wiping blood from his knife on his pants.Elena spoke up. Her voice was quiet but cut through. "Colonel. My mother said the nursery isn't the end. There's a backup. A place called the Memory Vault. It holds the original mind scans. The i
Chapter Thirty-six
The crying didn't last. It couldn't. The sound of it was all wrong in that room, with the dead lying around and that deep hum coming up through your boots. Elena sucked in a sharp breath, wiped her face on her sleeve, and it was over. The tears were gone. Replaced by nothing. Just empty.Colonel Rahim's soldiers moved down into the arena. They stepped over the Gen-2 bodies, checking for pulses. There were none. The scientists were huddled together. One of them was throwing up in a corner.Rahim came over. He looked at Elena, not me. "The virus triggered a kill switch. Not a cure. A termination command. Your mother's work… Voss must have tampered with it."Elena just nodded. She stared at the canister in her hand like it was a dead thing."We have the control room," Rahim said. "We control the doors, the air, the lights. The nursery is stable.""The people watching?" I asked. "The ones in the windows?""Gone. Private elevator to the roof. A fancy aircraft. They left the second the viru
Chapter Thirty-five
The trip back to the main chamber was a fight in itself. The halls weren't empty anymore. Gen-2 patrols, groups of three and four, were sweeping. Looking for us. The first group we ran into almost got the drop on us. Elena saw them first, yanked me back into a doorway. We watched them pass, their steps perfectly in time."See?" she whispered. "They're not just searching. They're herding."She was right. The patrols were pushing everything toward the arena. Toward the main event.We took a longer way, through more service ducts. Borealis was moving better, but he was slow. The antidote worked, but the wound was deep. He didn't complain.We could hear the fight before we saw it. Not the clean sounds from before. These were tired sounds. Grunts of effort. The dry click of an empty magazine. Caiman roaring, but it was a raw, strained sound now.We came out on a balcony above the killing floor. It was worse than we left it.Kenji and Caiman were back-to-back in the middle of the chessboard
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