Chapter 49 - The Lazarus Perimeter
Marco didn't even pause. His boots pounded against the iron grating, his breath tearing from his lungs in ragged, burning gasps.
"Then we have twelve minutes," he growled. "I survived eighteen years under that bastard's thumb. I'm not dying because of a line of code."
We burst through the heavy storm hatch at the top of the drainage tower.
The freezing night air of Chicago hit us like a physical blow. The midnight storm on Lake Michigan was in full fury, waves crashing violently against the concrete breakwater outside the Bellini family’s lakeside industrial docks. Snow swirled through the dark, stinging our faces and freezing the water on our clothes into solid rime.
Silas kicked open the steel door of the turbine control room. Inside, the massive hydroelectric turbines hummed, drawing water from the upper lake locks to power the estate’s hidden grids.
"Hook her up to the primary ground terminal!" Silas shouted, ripping open the panel of the central transformer. "If we dump the raw data stream into the turbine's induction coils, it will short the telemetry and burn out the transmission antenna in her chest!"
"Will it kill her?" Marco demanded, gently lowering me onto the metal operator's chair in front of the console.
"It might reset her heart," Silas said bluntly, his single eye wide with desperation. "And yours too, Marco. We have to synchronize both your devices to the turbine simultaneously, or the back-surge from her core will detonate your regulator on the spot!"
I looked at Marco. His face was gray. His chest was already seizing, his fingers curling inward as Samuel’s dead-man's switch began its countdown inside his ribcage.
"Do it," Marco said, kneeling beside me. He took my right hand, his fingers intertwining with mine, cold and trembling. "Together, Laura. We cut the strings together."
Silas grabbed the heavy dual copper leads, clamping one to the exposed titanium port beneath my collarbone, and the other to the synthetic access port over Marco’s failing heart.
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"Three!" Silas yelled over the roar of the wind and the turbine. "Two! One!"
He threw the master breaker.
