Chapter 75 - Echoes in the Trench
"Laura... run..." Marco gasped, his head falling forward.
His vitals were crashing. I could see the purplish hue of acute hypoxia creeping up his neck. The Bellini valve was seizing up; the magnetic clutch had locked completely.
"Shut up, Marco," I snapped, my nurse's voice overriding the terror in my blood. "Keep your eyes on me. Look at me!"
I turned my back on the approaching machine that wore my mother's face. I didn't have a sterile tray. I didn't have an operating room or an anesthesiologist. All I had was the ceramic scalpel, a pair of steel tweezers from my pocket kit, and my own biological connection to the system.
"You cannot save him, Laura," Eleanor said, her footsteps clicking on the acrylic floor as she advanced with slow, measured precision. "The Bellini prototype was engineered with an intentional flaw. Samuel wanted to ensure his son could never rebel. The moment Marco leaves the proximity of the primary chair, the induction valve initiates a terminal decay."
"Then I’ll rewrite the frequency," I snarled.
I didn't cut Marco's flesh this time. I jammed the ceramic scalpel directly into the diagnostic port on the side of his chest unit, twisting it forty-five degrees to bypass the mechanical lock.
Sparks leaped from the port, stinging the palms of my hands.
"Laura, don't!" Marco choked out. "The back-current will—"
I ignored him. With my bare left hand, I grabbed the exposed sapphire filament trailing from my own wrist—the biological shunt that had awakened when I touched the console.
I bridged the gap with my own body.
A jolt of pure, white-hot agony tore through my nervous system. It felt as though liquid fire was being pumped through my veins, incinerating every pain receptor from my fingers to my spine. My vision flashed with kaleidoscopic bursts of sapphire light.
*BIOMETRIC BRIDGE DETECTED.*
*ANOMALOUS OVERRIDE: PATIENT 0-A FREQUENCY DIVERTED.*
*SUBJECT: MARCO BELLINI — INDUCTION STABILIZED.*
Marco gasped, arching off the floor as a massive surge of current kickstarted the Bellini valve. The grinding noise stopped instantly, replaced by a smooth, rhythmic, hydrodynamic hum. The color rushed back into his cheeks, and the blue tint vanished from his lips.
Behind me, Eleanor paused. Her optical lenses widened in genuine algorithmic astonishment.
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"You sacrificed three percent of your cellular reserve to sustain a broken relic," she said, her voice registering a rare fluctuation of error. "Illogical. Counter-productive."
"It's called human loyalty, Mother," I gasped, wiping a trickle of warm blood from my nose. "Something your schematics forgot to account for."
