Chapter 92 - The Siphon of Lake Michigan
The stone crib shuddered violently as the vortex took hold. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of icy water were siphoned every second into the belly of the Anchor, creating an artificial maelstrom that groaned against the century-old masonry beneath our feet. Cracks spider-webbed across the reinforced concrete floor, spitting water through subterranean fissures.
"Laura! Now!" Luca roared, his boots sliding across the slick stone as Marco convulged beneath him.
I didn't hesitate. With steady hands honed by years in emergency trauma wards, I drove the tip of the obsidian scalpel into the secondary drainage port at the base of Marco’s sternum implant. The metal gave way with a crisp, metallic click. Thick, bio-synthetic lubricating fluid—dark as motor oil and flecked with gold dust—hissed out, relieving the internal pressure that had built up inside his chest.
I jammed the bare copper wire into the open port, wrapping the opposite end around the iron handrail bolted into the bedrock.
A brilliant shower of sapphire sparks erupted from the improvised ground. Marco gasped, a ragged, air-starved sound, and collapsed limp against the catwalk. The furious ticking in his chest dropped from a lethal sprint down to a heavy, sluggish thud. His pulse under my fingers was thready, barely sixty beats per minute, but the fatal synchronization had been broken.
"Marco? Marco, look at me," I pleaded, wiping frozen spray and sweat from his pale forehead.
His dark eyes fluttered open, glassy but conscious. "The carrier frequency... it’s an induction loop," he rasped, lifting a trembling hand to touch the wire protruding from his chest. "As long as the Anchor draws power from the city’s stolen grid, it broadcasts a harmonic field. It knows I’m here, Laura. It’s summoning the key."
"You aren't going near that thing," Luca growled, scanning the mist. "We take the service boat, cut across to the Navy Pier slips, and let the National Guard deal with an iron fortress in the middle of the lake."
"There is no National Guard coming, Luca," Marco said, hauling himself onto one elbow with agonizing effort. "Look at the horizon."
I turned toward the shoreline. The magnificent Chicago skyline, which had briefly sparked back to life after we severed the broadcast tower, was going dark once more—not from a cybernetic virus, but from sheer electrical starvation. The underwater cables connecting the lakeside power stations were visibly glowing beneath the surface of the harbor, their insulation burning out as the Anchor literally sucked the electrical grid dry through submerged high-voltage conduits.
"My father didn't build an escape pod," Marco said, his voice hardening with the cold, ruthless resolve of the Bellini patriarch he had spent his life trying not to become. "He built a siege engine. If that reactor finishes charging its primary capacitors, the kinetic displacement alone will trigger a tidal surge that will drown eight miles of the coastline. Michigan Avenue will be under twenty feet of freezing water before sunrise."
"And how do we stop a five-hundred-yard dreadnought with a scalpel and a rifle?" Luca demanded.
Marco looked down at his chest, where the obsidian device clicked in slow, steady defiance. "The Anchor doesn't run on computer algorithms. It runs on Samuel Bellini’s proprietary biomechanics. It doesn't have an administrative password. It has an anatomical one."
May you like
He gripped my wrist, his gaze burning into mine with an intensity that made the surrounding blizzard feel distant. "You cut me open to save my life, Laura. Now you have to guide my hand into the heart of my father's machine."
***
