THE SCREAM THAT STOPPED MY HEART

I didn't try to clear the jam. I threw the useless steel frame directly at her face.

The heavy slide struck Subject Seven squarely on the bridge of her nose. The impact cracked bone, but she didn't flinch. It barely threw her off balance for a tenth of a second, yet that tenth of a second was all I had.

I ducked beneath the descending steel pipe.

The galvanized bar crashed into the chain-link fence behind me, shearing three links with a shower of rust and orange sparks.

I drove my shoulder into her midsection, using my two hundred pounds of momentum to tackle her sixty-pound frame into the gravel. We slammed together into the mud, rolling through the frozen filth.

She was terrifyingly strong, but she had the leverage limitations of a child's skeletal frame. Her small, cold hands clawed at my throat, her fingernails tearing ribbons of flesh from my neck as she attempted to crush my trachea.

"Decommission... the biological... unit!" she hissed, her teeth bared in an animalistic snarl, Julian's voice rattling through her clenched jaw.

I pinned her right arm beneath my knee, caught her left wrist in an iron grip, and brought my forehead down onto hers with a sickening, brutal headbutt.

*Crack.*

The impact dazed her. The emerald circuitry beneath her temple flickered, short-circuiting under the blunt trauma.

Before she could recover, I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out the six-inch steel surgical pin I had palmed from Eleanor's instrument tray in the lab.

I drove it through the sleeve of her coat, straight through the flesh of her forearm, pinning her arm securely into the heavy oak railroad tie bordering the drainage gravel.

She let out a piercing, digitized shriek that sounded like feedback through an amplifier.

I scrambled backward on hands and knees, gasping for air, my throat burning where her fingers had gouged my skin.

Across the gravel, behind the dumpster, Emily was curled into a fetal ball, her hands over her ears, screaming in exact harmony with the monster pinned to the wood.

"It’s okay! Emily, it’s me!"

I scooped her off the ground, charged the maintenance depot gate, and threw my entire body against the rusted latch. The corroded iron gave way with a screech of shearing metal.

We burst into the depot yard.

The county ambulance was idling—the maintenance crew had left the block heater plugged in, but the keys were in the ignition, the diesel engine rumbling with a low, reassuring vibration.

I threw Emily onto the bench seat of the rear compartment, slammed the doors shut, and leaped into the driver’s cab.

I threw the transmission into reverse, flooring the pedal. The heavy dual rear tires caught traction on the wet asphalt, spitting gravel as the vehicle rocketed backward out of the gate, smashing through the remnants of the chain-link fence, and fish-tailed onto Route 9 heading north toward the city skyline.

Inside the cab, the fleet radio was alive with emergency dispatch traffic:

*ALL UNITS, ADVISORY THREE. BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR A STOLEN MUNICIPAL AMBULANCE, UNIT FOUR-SEVEN. SUSPECT IS ARMED AND EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. WANTED IN CONNECTION WITH MULTIPLE HOMICIDES AT HARBOR BASIN.*

Marcus owned the police department. He had already set the perimeter.

I reached up with trembling, bloody fingers and ripped the rearview mirror off the windshield, angling it to see Emily in the back.

She was sitting up.

She had found a clean towel in the paramedic supplies and had wrapped it around her shoulders. She was staring at her own hands—the pale, thin hands that had never held a weapon, never run through the sun, never played on a playground.

"Daddy?" she called out through the small sliding glass window between the cab and the compartment.

"I’m here, sweetie. Keep your head down."

"Daddy, on the radio... the man with the cane. He said there's a bomb."

I hit the brakes, pulling the heavy ambulance beneath the shadow of an abandoned railway overpass three miles from the city center. The windshield wipers beat a rhythmic, frantic tempo against the glass.

"What did you say, Emily?"

She crawled forward, her face pale, her hazel eyes wide with a terrible, adult clarity that no seven-year-old should ever possess.

"In the tank," she whispered, tears running down her chin. "When I was sleeping, the machine talked to me. It wasn't Uncle Marcus. It was Grandfather. His voice... it’s inside the water pipes."

My mind flashed back to the Architect’s office beneath the sewer main. The copper cylinders. The massive chemical conduits running into the municipal water filtration plant at Crown Ridge.

"The Scream Protocol," I breathed, my heart stopping.

Julian Vance hadn't built a syndicate to last forever. He had built a dead-man's switch. If his neural signature flatlined and wasn't manually overridden within seventy-two hours, the system would purge the entire metropolitan grid with weaponized neurotoxin. Erasing every witness. Every paper trail. Every living piece of the Vance bloodline.

And Marcus didn't have the detonator to stop it.

He was racing to Crown Ridge to upload Subject Seven's encryption key to save himself and take the money before the city choked to death on its own water.

I looked at the dashboard clock.

*03:42 AM.*