A countdown timer glowed above the terminal: 00:41:18. The backup generators had flooded three days earlier. When it hit zero, the capacitors would drain — and Lily would die with the array. Unless Mark replaced the core.
THE LOWER CORE
In a rubberized drysuit, Mark descended into the flooded Level Four drainage chamber: chest-deep freezing water, a jammed cooling valve pinned under a collapsed steel girder, and a micro-isotopic thermal battery reactor that would trigger a nitrogen failsafe — killing him instantly and cutting all power — if the water rose six more inches.
He freed the valve with a breaker bar. And as his headlamp swept the murk behind the reactor housing, it caught something floating in the water: a skeleton in a tailored business suit, a bullet hole clean through its forehead.
“Sterling,” Mark whispered into the radio. “Who is down here with me?”
“That is David,” Sterling replied flatly. “The man whose name was on the intercom. The man whose daughter you are raising.”
David Vance — Mark’s older brother, supposedly lost on a hiking trip seven years ago, memorialized with an empty casket. Six years earlier, David had stolen the prototype neural embryo to expose the project. Elena — the Cadmus Institute’s former lead embryologist — had helped him, erased her credentials, and run. David had returned three months ago to destroy the grid and free Lily. Sterling had “ensured the continuity of the experiment.”
Then a gunshot rang out from Level Three.
BLOOD ON THE TERMINAL
Mark cranked the valve open, slammed the secondary isotope cell into the reactor housing, and the grid roared back to life. He climbed to the observation room — and found it slick with fresh blood. Dr. Sterling lay slumped in his wheelchair, a bullet through his chest. Standing over him, holding a smoking revolver, was Elena. In the doorway stood Lily, nosebleed gone, color returned, watching with unblinking hazel eyes.