Chapter 41 - The Thread of No Return
I didn't place both hands flat against the shuttle rail as Eleanor had instructed.
Instead, I reached into the lining of my tactical jacket and pulled out the single item I had kept hidden since the morning of my ruined wedding: the antique silver tailoring shears that my father had engraved with my initials on the day I was born.
Before Bartholomew's guards could register the movement, I jammed the hardened steel blades of the shears directly into the high-voltage superconducting power conduit feeding the quantum loom's optical core.
A violent, blinding arc of blue electrical fire erupted from the chassis with a sound like a tearing thunderbolt.
The surge blew the server racks into a storm of sparks and molten copper. The golden punch cards flash-fried in mid-air, vaporizing into a cloud of iridescent dust. The force of the electrical discharge hurled me backward across the stone floor, crashing hard against the timber frame of the boathouse.
Emergency klaxons wailed through the subterranean bunker. Red strobe lights cast frantic, spinning shadows across the chaos.
"Kill her!" David Vance roared, drawing his pistol.
A single shot cracked through the vault, but it didn't come from David’s men.
Bartholomew Vance gasped, dropping his cane. A dark circle bloomed on the crisp white linen of his shirt, precisely over his heart. He looked down in disbelief, then collapsed forward onto the wet stones.
Behind him stood Julian. He had crawled to the fallen sidearm of Eleanor’s dead operator, his arm braced against a support timber, the smoking barrel still raised.
"Drop your weapons!" Eleanor screamed, rolling to her feet, snatching a discarded submachine gun, and opening fire on David Vance’s personal guard before they could recover from the shock of their patriarch’s death.
The boathouse turned into an inferno of crossfire. Concrete chips flew like shrapnel. Sophia dragged me behind the stone pedestal of the wrecked loom as rounds chewed through the ancient oak timbers above us.
"We have to get to the water!" Sophia screamed over the deafening roar of the gunfire. "The boathouse launch—there’s an offshore tender docked beneath the slipway!"
I looked through the haze of smoke. David Vance was dragging himself toward the wrecked terminal, his hands bloody, frantically trying to salvage the burned optical core.
"It’s gone, David!" I yelled over the din. "The code is dead! There is no monopoly! There is no empire!"
David turned toward me, his face twisted into a mask of pure, unadulterated madness. He raised his weapon directly at my face.
Suddenly, a heavy body slammed into him. Julian tackled his own father off the slipway ledge, both of them plunging into the churning, icy black waters of Lake Geneva fifteen feet below.
"Julian!" I screamed, lunging toward the edge of the platform.
Eleanor grabbed me by the collar of my jacket, hauling me back violently just as a secondary explosion ripped through the boathouse’s electrical main. "Clara, the support pillars are failing! The lake is breaching the stone!"
A catastrophic crack echoed through the chamber. Tons of icy water began cascading through the ceiling, flooding the flagstones in an instant, rising to our waists within seconds.
"The boat! Now!" Sophia cried, kicking open the emergency hatch to the submerged slipway.
Eleanor pushed me into the sleek, armored tender docked in the subterranean canal. Sophia tumbled in after me. Eleanor slammed the starter button, and the twin inboard diesels roared to life with a deafening surge of torque.
"Wait!" I begged, staring back at the dark, boiling waters where Julian and David had fallen. "We can't leave him! Julian is still in the water!"
Through the rising floodwaters and the drifting smoke of burning magnesium, a lone hand broke the surface near the edge of the slipway platform. A man hauled himself onto the stone, coughing violently, soaked in dark lake water.
The emergency lights flickered, illuminating his face for a single fraction of a second.
It wasn't Julian.
It was David Vance. And in his clenched, bleeding right fist, dripping with freezing water and scorched copper, was the secondary backup drive that had been concealed within Julian’s tactical vest all along.
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David looked directly into my eyes through the spray of the collapsing vault, smiled a hideous, bloody grin, and pressed the remote detonation switch on the boathouse wall.
The stone ceiling above our launch began to collapse into the abyss.
