Chapter 48 - Blood in the Turbine
"Laura... what is that?" Marco asked, his voice shaking as he reached out, his wet fingers hovering over my collarbone without daring to touch it.
"It's not stopping," I whispered, terror gripping my throat.
Even though Samuel’s body was crushed beneath tons of water and debris, Prototype Zero was spinning faster than it ever had before. The internal tachometer clicked in my ears like a runaway clock: 140 beats per minute... 160... 180...
*DATA TRANSMISSION IN PROGRESS: 78%... 84%...*
"The siphon didn't just discharge into the water," I realized with mounting horror, clutching my chest as waves of feverish heat radiated through my ribs. "When I drove the grounding rod into his core, the polarity reversed. Prototype Zero didn't just reject Samuel's overwrite... it downloaded his master archive!"
"Every asset," Silas whispered, staring down at my chest from the stairs above. "Every bank account, every corrupt judge, every black-site laboratory, and every trigger code for every heart regulator the Bellini family ever installed across the globe."
"It's overloading her system," Marco snarled, scooping me up into his arms despite the agony in his own damaged chest. "We have to vent the excess charge! Where is Arthur's failsafe?"
"The turbine shaft," I gasped, my vision blurring into streaks of violet and gold. The sheer volume of encrypted data flooding my neural pathways was pushing my biological brain into an excitotoxic seizure. "The lake drainage turbines at the surface level... they have an electromagnetic buffer... we can dump the telemetry there!"
We ran.
Silas led the way up the narrow, spiral service stairs as the water chased us upward, foaming and roaring like a living beast, consuming floor after floor of the secret facility. The steel walls shrieked under the pressure of Lake Michigan, rivets popping out of the bulkheads like sniper rounds.
Behind my eyes, names and numbers flashed in endless, terrifying waterfalls:
*SENATOR CROSS: PACEMAKER REVISION 2.4 — KILL CODE ACTIVE.*
*CHIEF JUSTICE VANCE: SUTURED VALVE — OVERRIDE READY.*
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*MARCO BELLINI: THORACIC PROTOCOL OMEGA — CONTINGENCY LOCKED.*
"Marco..." I sobbed, gripping his wet shirt as he carried me up the vibrating metal rungs. "Your regulator... he built a dead-man's switch into you. If his core went offline, your heart was programmed to stop in twelve minutes!"
