Chapter 73 - The Matriarch's Pulse
We fell through a pressurized air-curtain that stripped the freezing lake water away in a blinding roar of compressed gas.
We slammed hard onto a floor of solid, frosted acrylic. Marco landed with a heavy groan, rolling onto his side, clutching his chest. His skin was turning cyanotic, his lips a frightening shade of slate blue. The induction unit in his chest was rattling like a dead engine, whining at frequencies that rattled my back molars.
Above us, the massive titanium blast hatch sealed shut with a deafening hydraulic thud, cutting off the deluge of Lake Michigan.
We were in a vast, subterranean cathedral of glass and chrome. Unlike the decaying, copper-and-leather aesthetic of Samuel Bellini's 1950s empire, and unlike the brutalist steel of Vance Industries, this facility was pristine. It was an operating theater built on an impossible scale, suspended within an air pocket deep beneath the bedrock of the Great Lakes.
In the center of the room stood an array of seven vertical glass cylinders. Six of them were empty, their interior umbilical cables floating in amber preserving fluid.
The seventh cylinder was shattered from the inside—the one Eleanor had just vacated.
A few yards away, Eleanor rose from the floor with unsettling grace. Her carbon-fiber joints made no sound. The lake water that coated her skin was rapidly evaporating, heated by the thermal coils running just beneath her synthetic flesh.
"Richard Vance thought he was an architect," Eleanor said, pacing toward a central circular console that hummed with a soft, pulsing light. "Samuel Bellini thought he was a sovereign. They were both small men playing with needles and gears."
"You... you built this," I said, helping Marco sit up and leaning his back against a reinforced terminal. My hands were already at his collar, ripping open his wet shirt. The light on his heart device was flickering between gold and violet, fighting the overriding sapphire wave. "My father didn't lock you away. You locked *them* out."
Eleanor turned her crystalline eyes toward me. A subtle twitch in her synthetic cheek suggested an attempt at an emotional smile, but the biomechanical servos could only manage a grim, uncanny grimace.
"Richard wanted an heir who could survive the coming collapse," she said quietly. "Samuel wanted immortality for his dying dynasty. I wanted a closed thermodynamic loop. A human being whose autonomic nervous system was tethered directly to the electromagnetic field of the continent."
May you like
She pointed a finger at my chest.
"You were never meant to be a nurse, Laura. You were manufactured to be the regulator."
