Chapter 44 - The Memory in the Melody
"Come here, sweetie," I whispered, kneeling in front of Lily.
She looked at me with her huge, intelligent brown eyes—eyes that held none of the fear that was tearing my own heart apart. She reached out and touched my cheek with warm fingers.
"Mommy, Grandpa played the piano with me every Sunday," Lily said, her voice clear in the quiet bunker. "He said people build walls with concrete, but angels build gates with music. He said if the lights ever went out in the whole world, I had to sing the gate open."
"Can you remember it, Lily?" Graham asked gently, stepping over from the workbench. He knelt beside us, keeping his towering frame soft and unthreatening. "Can you remember the whole tune?"
Lily nodded slowly. "There are four parts. The first part opened the safe at Elmhurst. The second part made the wedding screen show Grandpa's face. The third part turned off the ship's big engine."
She paused, looking down at the silver flash drive, which Markus had cleaned and placed on the wooden table.
"And the fourth part?" I asked, my heart hammering against my ribs.
"The fourth part is the long one," she said. "Grandpa called it 'The Architect’s Will.' He made me hum it until my throat hurt, but he told me I must never, ever sing the last eight notes unless we were standing in the iron room under the mountains."
Markus exhaled sharply, crossing himself under his tactical jacket. "Mount Weather. The decommissioned secondary relay station in the Blue Ridge Mountains. That's where Arthur built the physical terminal."
"That's nearly six hundred miles away," Graham said, his face hardening as he looked at the rusted maps pinned to the wall. "Across three states with zero functioning power grids, collapsed traffic infrastructure, and millions of panicked citizens. And you can bet your life the Consortium’s ground teams are already deploying tactical convoys with EMP-shielded vehicles."
"We don't have a choice," I said, standing up and pulling Lily into my embrace. "The blackout won't last forever. Whoever has the backups will rewrite history. If the Consortium brings their auxiliary servers online before we reach that mountain, they own everything. Every hospital, every bank, every life."
May you like
Markus pulled a set of heavy brass keys from his pocket and tossed them to Graham.
"In the back tunnel," Markus said grimly. "An old 1974 Dodge Power Wagon. Pure mechanical carburetor, mechanical fuel pump, no computer chips to fry. We leave in twenty minutes."
