Chapter 24 - THE CONCRETE COFFIN BREAK
Subject Seven fired.
The bullet tore through the fleshy meat of my left shoulder, spinning me half-around. The kinetic shock burned like a branding iron, but instinct took over before my brain could register the agony. I didn't return fire at her face; I fired low, sending a burst of 9mm rounds into the high-pressure hydraulic lines beneath the central tank’s descending platform.
The pressurized hydraulic oil erupted in a violent, aerosolized jet of flammable vapor.
The rounds sparked against the steel frame.
*BOOM.*
A wall of yellow fire erupted between us, throwing Subject Seven backward into the control banks. The concussion wave slammed me against the heavy steel bulkhead of the corridor. Alarms transitioned from an alert tone to the automated voice of the base defense network:
*FIRE SUPPRESSION FAILURE. SECTOR FOUR ISOLATION IN SIXTY SECONDS.*
Thick, black chemical smoke rolled across the ceiling, choking out the emergency lights. Through the blinding curtain of fire, I saw the hydraulic lift shudder and stall. The glass tank holding the real Emily had jammed five feet above the floor, trapped halfway between the ceiling and the subterranean vault below.
"Emily!" I screamed, lunging through the heat.
The heat singed the hair from my arms and blistered the skin on my face, but I didn't feel it. I reached the tank. The glass was cool against my burned hands, insulated against the flames. Inside the fluid, the real Emily remained perfectly still, the blue luminescence of her life-support cables casting an angelic glow over her pale, sleeping face.
She looked so small. So fragile. Not like the monster that had broken my bones on the pier.
I looked at the primary release valve on the side of the canister. It was secured by a four-bolt manual pressure clamp.
I discarded the empty MP5, grabbed an abandoned titanium pry-bar from the technician's repair rack, and jammed it beneath the first locking lug.
*One.* The steel bolt sheared with a loud bang.
*Two.* The clamp buckled, spraying a jet of warm saline over my legs.
From behind the smoke, footsteps approached—rapid, light, completely silent except for the faint scuff of rubber on tile.
I didn't turn around. I ripped the third clamp loose.
A hand caught me by the back of the neck.
Small fingers, hard as marble, drove into the pressure points behind my ear. A bolt of white-hot agony shot through my nervous system, paralyzing my legs. I dropped to my knees before the tank, my vision tunneling into grey static.
Subject Seven stepped out of the smoke. Her clothes were scorched, and half her synthetic hair was singed away, revealing a network of subdermal micro-circuitry along her left temple that pulsed with rhythmic green light. She held a heavy steel wrench she had pulled from the maintenance floor.
"You are an inefficient organism," she stated, her voice fluctuating wildly between a little girl's squeak and my father's booming authority. "You prioritize a single genetic unit over systemic preservation. It is why you were excluded from the Will."
She raised the wrench to crush my skull.
"Emily," I whispered, not looking at her, but looking past her at the girl in the tank. "If you can hear me... fight it."
Subject Seven paused, the wrench hovering inches from my head.
Inside the glass cylinder, for the first time in seven years, the real Emily’s eyelids snapped open.
They were not silver.
They were deep, brilliant, human hazel—the exact color of my wife’s eyes on the morning we were married in the rain.
Inside the water, Emily’s small, pale hand reached out and pressed against the interior glass, right where my bloody palm rested on the outside.
Subject Seven froze completely. Her artificial eye twitched violently, the subdermal circuits beneath her temple flaring with a blinding emerald light. She dropped the wrench; it clattered harmlessly against the floor.
"Error," Subject Seven gasped, her hands flying to her ears as she fell to her knees beside me, vomiting clear fluid. "Signal... feedback... primary consciousness... refusing secondary protocol..."
*The neural bridge works both ways,* I realized with sudden, shocking clarity. *The clone isn't autonomous—she’s a receiver!*
With a final roar of adrenaline, I slammed the pry-bar into the fourth clamp.
The front glass of the tank shattered.
Thousands of gallons of warm, chlorinated saline cascaded into the room, sweeping Subject Seven off her feet and into the burning wreckage of the control console.
I threw myself forward, catching Emily as she spilled out of the tank in a tangle of disconnected wires and breathing tubes. Her skin was freezing, her body feather-light, completely limp in my arms.
I ripped the endotracheal tube from her throat.
She choked, a desperate, fluid-filled rattle vibrating in her chest.
"I've got you," I sobbed, pulling her wet head against my chest, covering her naked, shivering body with my torn tactical jacket. "Daddy’s got you, baby. I’m not leaving you. Never again."
*TEN SECONDS TO SECTOR ISOLATION.*
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The heavy blast doors at the end of the maintenance corridor were beginning to grind downward.
I scooped Emily into my right arm, grabbed the dropped sidearm from the floor with my left, and sprinted into the dark, flooded service tunnel just as twelve tons of reinforced steel slammed shut behind us, sealing the glass labyrinth in an inferno of boiling saline and burning secrets.
