Chapter 43 - The Phantom Heartbeat
Samuel had never died.
The funeral eighteen years ago, the sealed casket, the bronze chair left as a morbid shrine in the study—it was all a monstrous staging ground. The old patriarch had placed his failing biological body into deep stasis beneath the freezing floor of Lake Michigan, maintaining a ghost of his consciousness within the chair’s algorithmic network until the technology Arthur Vance developed could mature enough to bridge the biological divide.
And Prototype Zero—the device beating in my chest—was the final key.
*"Thirty-four percent,"* the voice whispered in my inner ear, though Samuel's lips inside the glass tank remained motionless. *"The vessel is young. The neural plasticity of a Vance. The vascular strength of youth. You have served your purpose, Laura."*
"Get off her!" Marco’s voice cut through the fog of my fracturing mind.
He dragged himself out of the freezing current, his face pale from the arrhythmia caused by his own malfunctioning regulator. He climbed onto the bronze dais, dripping wet, his hands shaking as he reached for the lock pins beneath the chair's armrests.
"Don't touch the bronze, Marco!" I managed to choke out, the paralysis loosening just enough for my voice to emerge as a ragged rasp. "The loop... if you ground yourself to me while it's syncing, it will draw your regulator into the feedback loop! It'll stop your heart!"
"I don't give a damn about my heart," Marco snarled.
He didn't pull back. Instead, he reached into his vest, pulling out the obsidian scalpel I had dropped during the initial struggle. The volcanic glass blade gleamed black and lethal under the flickering emergency strobes.
"Where is the master feed?" he demanded, his gray eyes burning with frantic terror and stubborn mafia fury. "Laura, tell me where to cut!"
May you like
"The subclavian conduit!" I cried out as another wave of foreign memories tore through my consciousness—images of a ledger signed in blood, deeds to orphanages, secret offshore laboratories. "Right beneath the left collarbone! But you have to sever the fiber-optic line without nicking the titanium sleeve, or the internal capacitor will detonate!"
Marco braced his knee against the arm of the chair, his jaw set in stone. "Hold on to me."
