Everyone warned Laura never to touch Marco Bellini’s father’s chair, but when his heart device started beeping, she cut it open and uncovered a terrifying secret… / Chapter 34 / 100

Chapter 34 - The Flooded Catacombs

The sound of thermite burning through industrial steel is unmistakable: a feral, whistling hiss that drowns out all human thought, accompanied by the smell of burning slag, sulfur, and incinerated rust.

"Get Julian moving!" Silas roared, firing three rounds into the ceiling around the expanding orange circle of molten metal.

Chunks of glowing slag crashed onto the metal walkway, setting the rubberized conduit cables ablaze. Thick, acrid black smoke instantly billowed through the narrow tunnel, blinding us and choking our already freezing lungs.

"Marco, we have to run!" I coughed, pulling his arm over my neck again.

This time, Marco didn't hesitate. Whatever psychological fracture had appeared between us when Silas revealed my father’s sins, the mafia prince buried it deep beneath his instinct for survival. He wrapped his arm securely around my shoulders, his free hand holding his .45, his gaze scanning the shadows through the rising smoke.

"Silas, where does this service shaft lead?" Marco demanded as we jogged down the downward-sloping conduit, following the two operators carrying Julian's litter.

"It empties into the old freight tunnels beneath the Chicago Loop," Silas yelled back, bringing up the rear with his carbine raised. "The pneumatic freight network built in 1906. Abandoned fifty years ago, but it connects directly to the basements of the downtown financial district. Vance doesn't have surveillance cameras down there—the tunnels are unmapped on city records."

"And the water?" I asked, feeling a cold, wet draft whistling up through the floor grates ahead.

"The freight tunnels sit ten feet below the riverbed," Silas replied grimly. "If Vance opens the river locks, the entire downtown labyrinth becomes an underwater tomb. We have twenty minutes before his remote overrides breach the city’s drainage gates."

We rounded a sharp curve in the tunnel and plunged into a vast, echoing darkness.

The beam of Silas's tactical lights illuminated an eerie, forgotten world. Narrow-gauge railroad tracks, red with decades of corrosion, stretched into the infinite blackness between curved walls of dripping whitewashed concrete. Overhead, thick bundles of ancient, lead-sheathed telephone cables hung like giant dead vines, draped in cobwebs and dripping black sludge.

The water here was already shin-deep, sluggish and smelling of rot and stagnant river sediment.

"Set the litter down on the dry ledge," I ordered the medics, breaking away from Marco for a brief second. My clinical responsibilities refused to be silenced by gunfire or ancient family curses.

I knelt beside Julian, ripping open the thermal wrap. His face was slightly flushed now, the chemical heat packs doing their work, but his respirations had grown dangerously shallow. I pressed my fingers against his carotid artery.

His pulse had spiked: one hundred and forty beats a minute, completely erratic.

"He’s slipping into ventricular tachycardia," I said, looking up at Silas with panic rising in my throat. "The sudden temperature shift is triggering the ischemic focus in his heart. If I don't defibrillate him or push twenty milligrams of amiodarone right now, he’s going to go into full cardiac arrest!"

"We don't have antiarrhythmics in these tactical kits," Silas’s medic said, his face pale beneath his tactical mask. "Only morphine, atropine, and field battle dressings!"

"Atropine will kill him!" I snapped. "His heart is already beating too fast!"

"Laura," Marco said, stepping closer. He was swaying slightly, his face bathed in sweat despite the freezing cold. "Your chip. The master frequency. Silas said it could control our implants."

I froze, looking up at Marco. "I don't know how to use it! Marco, I don't have a remote control! It’s buried inside my tissue! I don't even know what frequency it operates on!"

"You don't need a remote," Silas said, stepping forward and shining a bright tactical light directly onto my chest. "The Janus array was designed to work on direct physiological resonance. Arthur Keller designed it so that the mother chip syncs with the subordinate chips through skin-to-skin acoustic conduction."

"Skin to skin?" I echoed, my mind racing through the principles of electrophysiology. Human tissue is ninety percent water; acoustic and low-frequency electromagnetic waves travel four times faster through biological fluid than through open air.

"Put your hand directly over Julian’s implant," Silas commanded. "Breathe slowly. Force your own heart rate down. The subordinate chip will read your sinus node as the master pacemaker and slave its frequency to yours."

"That's theoretical bio-engineering from twenty years ago!" I protested. "If I'm wrong, the electrical mismatch could stop his heart permanently!"

"He’s dying right now, Laura!" Marco shouted, his voice cracking with desperation. "Look at him!"

Julian's body began to seize, his hands curling into tight, spastic claws as his brain starved for oxygen. His chest twitched in the chaotic, useless flutter of ventricular fibrillation.

There was no time to debate ethics. No time to second-guess the ghosts of my father's sins.