Chapter 44 - THE CLIMB INTO THE STORM
Grace looked down.
Through the churning, foam-streaked water illuminated by the dying emergency beacon, her mother’s face stared up at her. Judith’s fingernails were dug deep into the leather of Grace’s boot, her mouth open in a soundless, terrifying grimace of survival.
"Grace..." Judith’s voice gurgled through the water. "Don't leave me down here... the archive... the family..."
Grace looked into the eyes of the woman who had abandoned her thirty years ago to be raised as an expendable servant in the dark corners of the Whitaker manor. She saw no mother there. She saw only the cold, unyielding machinery of the Directorate.
"There is no family, Judith," Grace whispered.
With her free foot, Grace kicked down with all her strength, her heel striking Judith’s wrist.
The grip broke.
Judith Mercer was instantly swept backward into the dark, roaring vortex of the drainage culvert, vanishing into the subterranean abyss as the water swallowed the entire floor of Sub-Level 3 with a final, thunderous gulp of displaced air.
Grace began to climb.
Up, up through the narrow, rusted conduit they went, the vertical iron shaft vibrating violently from the tremendous hydraulic forces tearing through the mountain below. Evan climbed directly beneath Sophie, his hands ready to catch her if her frozen fingers slipped, his back screaming with exhaustion.
"Keep going, Sophie," Evan urged through clenched teeth. "Almost there. Look up, look for the light."
Thirty feet above them, a circular patch of gray sky appeared as the storm wind tore the rusted ventilation cowl from the top of the shaft. Rain poured down the tube in blinding sheets, but it was fresh rain—clean, mountain rain, smelling of cedar and wild freedom.
Sophie reached the lip of the shaft first. Her small hands scrambled over the wet concrete rim, pulling herself out onto the wind-blasted concrete pad of the abandoned radar dome.
Evan surged up behind her, grabbing her under the arms and hoisting her onto the platform before reaching back down into the dark opening.
"Grace! Take my hand!"
Grace’s hand, slick with mud and blood, locked into his. Evan braced his boots against the concrete lip and pulled with everything he had, heaving her out of the shaft just as a geyser of pressurized water exploded upward through the tube behind them, shooting fifty feet into the night sky like a violent geyser.
The three of them collapsed onto the cracked concrete of the mountain summit, gasping for air, the freezing rain beating down on their shivering bodies.
Below them, through the dense veil of storm clouds, the Allegheny valley lay quiet. The Blackwood installation was completely dark, its subterranean heart flooded, its fifty years of surveillance files buried under twenty million tons of mountain runoff.
Sophie crawled over to Evan and buried her face into his chest, her small shoulders shaking with silent, exhausted sobs.
Evan wrapped his arms around her, pulling Grace into the circle with his other arm, pressing his forehead against Sophie’s wet hair.
"It's over," Evan whispered, his tears mixing with the rain on his cheeks. "It’s over, baby. We’re out. You’re safe."
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"Evan," Grace whispered, her voice trembling not from the cold, but from something she saw on the horizon.
Evan looked up.
