Everyone warned Laura never to touch Marco Bellini’s father’s chair, but when his heart device started beeping, she cut it open and uncovered a terrifying secret… / Chapter 99 / 100

Chapter 99 - The Severance Protocol

"The whole damn thing is breaking apart!" Luca yelled, catching Marco as the boss collapsed from the electrical surge.

The Anchor was dying. Without the magnetic containment field of the core, the structural ribs of the ship were buckling inward under the colossal weight of Lake Michigan. Iron plates groaned and tore away from their frames with the sound of snapping artillery shells. Freezing water poured into the bilge from dozens of ruptures, rising from our ankles to our waists in mere seconds.

"The arterial dock!" I yelled, coughing as steam from the shattered core filled the lower corridors. "The maintenance skiff was secured to the outer airlock! If we reach it before the ballast tanks fully flood, we can ride the displacement wave to the surface!"

"Marco can't run, doc!" Luca shouted, struggling to support Marco's dead weight through the rushing, waist-deep torrent.

"Then we carry him!" I snapped, grabbing Marco’s other arm and hauling him forward.

We dragged him up the listing iron stairs, the water chasing us like a living predator. The corridor was disintegrating around us; light bulbs exploded in showers of sparks, and overhead conduits tore free, whipping through the steam like severed tentacles.

Marco’s head rolled against my shoulder, his lips blue from the creeping hypothermia. "Laura..." he whispered, barely audible over the roar of the incoming lake. "Leave me... in the belly of the machine. It’s where my father wanted me."

"Shut up, Marco," I hissed, tightening my grip on his sodden coat. "I didn't cut open that chair, expose the Bellini syndicate, and stitch your shattered heart back together just to let you drown in your father’s toy box. You survive this. You hear me? You survive!"

We reached the arterial dock just as the lower catwalk collapsed into the flooded abyss behind us.

The maintenance skiff was still there, battered against the hull plates, straining against the heavy steel mooring cables Luca had fired into the wall. Luca hit the outer airlock purge button, and the massive exterior hatch swung open.

The freezing winter wind hit us like a physical blow.

The lake outside was a swirling cauldron of foam, ice, and sinking iron. The Anchor’s bow was already pointing down into the forty-fathom trench, dragging its massive bulk beneath the black waves.

Luca tossed Marco into the open cockpit of the skiff, followed immediately by me. He leaped to the controls, fired the diesel engines, and threw the throttle into reverse just as he cut the mooring cables with a tactical axe.

The skiff shot backward into the freezing darkness of the lake just as the Anchor took its final plunge.

A monstrous vortex formed as the five-hundred-yard monolith slipped beneath the surface, threatening to drag our small boat down into the trench. Luca redlined the twin diesels, the propellers screaming against the churning foam, fighting the pull of the abyss until, with a final shudder, the water smoothed out into rolling, icy swells.

The Anchor was gone.

Behind us, five miles across the dark expanse of water, the lights of Chicago flickered, held steady, and then flared to life with blinding, beautiful brilliance. The skyline rose into the winter night—safe, whole, and free from the phantom frequency that had held it hostage for decades.