Chapter 33 - Bloodline Collateral
Smoke—thick, sulfurous, and blinding—poured through the jagged seam of the buckled blast door. The smell of burning thermite and melting alloy filled the confined crypt of Sector Nine.
"They’re through the first layer!" Evelyn screamed, coughing violently as she aimed her pistol through the smoking gap. "We have thirty seconds before the hinges melt!"
Helena dragged herself toward the bronze sarcophagus. Her hand trembled as she slid an access panel aside near the foot of the cryogenic unit, revealing a heavy biometric cradle designed for an adult palm.
"There is an escape elevator," Helena gasped, her face pale as death, blood pooling beneath her Kevlar vest. "It leads up to the old carriage house behind the north ridge. But it’s tied to Clara’s biometric profile. It requires a live neural response or an exact genetic equivalent."
"You’re her twin," Ethan said, coughing through the rising smoke. "Use your hand!"
"My genome is degraded," Helena said, her eyes hollow. "The scanner won't recognize my degraded telomeres. It was calibrated to Clara’s healthy baseline." She turned her gaze slowly toward the floor.
Toward the two children.
"Leo," Ethan said, cold dread paralyzing his limbs. "You need Leo."
"Leo has Clara’s pristine, unmutated genome," Helena said, her voice frantic as the blast door shrieked under another heavy hydraulic ram from the hallway. "Just his palm on the scanner! It won't harm him, Ethan! It just reads his capillary vascular pattern!"
Ethan didn't wait. He scooped Leo up, the toddler crying out in terror as the air filled with sparks and gray smoke. Ethan brought the eighteen-month-old to the console, gently pressing Leo’s tiny, soft palm against the glass biometric pad.
A beam of bright green light swept across the baby’s hand.
*BIOMETRIC SCAN: IDENTITY CONFIRMED.*
*SUBJECT: VANCE, INFANT MALE 02.*
*GENETIC HOMOLOGY TO ARCHITECT: 99.8%.*
*CLEARANCE GRANTED.*
A low, mechanical rumble reverberated behind the bronze tomb. A six-foot section of the stone wall ground backward, revealing an industrial hydraulic lift just large enough for four people.
"Get in!" Ethan yelled, grabbing Julian and pushing Evelyn toward the opening.
"Ethan, wait!" Helena screamed from the floor.
Ethan turned.
Behind Helena, the blast door finally blew inward in a deafening torrent of sparks, molten metal, and concussive force. Three tactical operators in black body armor stormed through the breach, their weapon lights piercing the smoke.
Helena didn't run for the elevator.
She lunged forward, throwing her bleeding body across the open control console of the cryogenic sarcophagus. Her fingers seized an emergency red lever marked *QUARANTINE PURGE — THERMIC INCINERATION*.
"Helena, no!" Ethan yelled, reaching out an arm.
"Take your sons, Ethan!" she screamed through the roaring smoke, her eyes blazing with a terrifying, fierce clarity. "Take them and burn this house to the ground! Don't let them have her!"
Helena slammed the red lever down.
A high-pitched siren wailed through Sector Nine. Automatic titanium shutters slammed down between the stone crypt and the escape elevator, cutting Ethan off from the room.
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The last thing Ethan saw through the narrowing slit of the blast shutter was Helena looking directly into the muzzle of an assault rifle, smiling as the entire chamber behind her erupted into a wall of white-hot, consuming thermite fire.
***
