Chapter 20 - The Resonant Chamber
The mercenaries stepped down from the iron crawler, their boots crunching on the glassified sagebrush.
Isabel checked her cylinder. Two rounds left.
*Two rounds against four men in iron plate and a half-machine monster.*
Her gaze dropped to the ground between them. Running across the caliche was the heavy, insulated dynamite line she and her scouts had laid three days ago to seal the canyon pass in case the infection breached the lower levels. The blasting cap was situated fifty yards to the left, but the exposed fuse ran right across the silver thread web at her feet.
She looked at Naira. The child's breathing had become synchronised with the hum of the silver sand.
"Forgive me, baby," Isabel muttered.
She didn't aim at the mercenaries. She didn't aim at Halden.
She aimed the Colt straight down at the exposed nitroglycerin blasting cap buried four feet beneath the silver soil.
"Isabel, no!" Halden’s mechanical voice lost its composure, screeching in sudden, frantic alarm. "The geological fault—it will shatter the broadcast array!"
"Good," she whispered.
She pulled the trigger.
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The explosion was not fire—it was a shockwave of kinetic, blinding white energy. The blast ignited the volatile subterranean gases venting through the silver fissures. The canyon rim fractured like dropped porcelain, splitting open in a colossal, jagged chasm that swallowed the iron crawler, the mercenaries, and Halden in a roaring avalanche of stone and shattered steel.
The ground beneath Isabel’s boots dissolved into empty air.
