Chapter 72 - Sub-Trench Lab 04
"Marco!" I screamed, diving forward.
My fingers caught the collar of his tactical vest just as the undertow threatened to drag him beneath the subterranean floor. The water was rising at an astronomical rate; the breach in the Leviathan's upper containment dome had opened a direct conduit to the glacial pressure of Lake Michigan.
"Leave me!" Marco grunted, his face pale, his teeth chattering uncontrollably as the freezing water engulfed his lower torso. "The valve... Laura, the valve is locking up! The sapphire signal is overriding the Bellini frequency!"
I looked down at the console. The electric blue display was cycling through lines of automated surgical code:
*AUTONOMOUS RETRIEVAL PROTOCOL ACTIVE.*
*DONOR 0-A SYNCHRONIZATION: 88%.*
*SECONDARY HARVEST HARVESTER ENGAGED: TARGET LAURA VANCE.*
*SUB-TRENCH DRAINAGE OVERRIDE: 30 SECONDS TO TOTAL CATACLYSMIC FLOOD.*
The diving bell above us was already out of reach. The catwalk leading to the upper hoist had buckled beneath the falling debris of the collapsing ceiling. Our only escape from drowning was the very hatch from which the specter of my mother had emerged. Sub-Trench Lab 04 had an independent pneumatic seal; its blue mist indicated an airtight hyperbaric chamber operating beneath the lakebed bedrock.
"We go down," I said, my voice hardening. The shock was burning away, replaced by the instinct that had kept me alive in emergency trauma wards for seven years. "Marco, grab the rail! We drop through the hatch!"
"Are you insane?" Marco gasped, coughing up water as a wave splashed over his mouth. "She’s waiting down there!"
"She wants my thoracic core, which means she won't kill me until she has me strapped to a table," I said grimly. "And that gives us a window."
I drew my ceramic scalpel—the one I had used to sever the telemetry wire in his father's chair—and drove it directly into the pneumatic release valve beside the hatch.
A high-pitched hiss answered the strike. Eleanor turned toward me, her sapphire-threaded hand reaching out not in violence, but with a calculated, surgical trajectory aimed directly at my throat.
"Return to the cradle, Laura," she hummed, the lullaby resuming through an internal speaker in her throat. "The loop must close."
May you like
"Not today, Mother," I muttered.
I kicked the manual override lever with the heel of my combat boot. The secondary blast doors beneath our feet hissed open into the dark abyss. The whirlpool of thousands of gallons of lake water seized us instantly, sweeping Marco, Eleanor, and me into the throat of Sub-Trench Lab 04.
