You let your own wife and daughter act as cannon fodder while you hid behind the Consortium’s shadow.”
Thomas Sterling spat a mouthful of blood onto the steel bridge, a twisted, maniacal grin stretching across his weathered face.
“My wife was a fool.
Victoria was an incompetent parasite.
They had no vision.
They thought money was about lavish galas and diamond necklaces.
They didn’t understand the true nature of power.”
He reached into his tactical harness, pulling out a small, glowing red detonator tied directly to the structural supports of the cavern ceiling.
“Thomas, don’t!”
Emma warned, stepping forward.
“If you drop this cavern, Lake Michigan will flood through the bedrock!
You’ll drown yourself along with the whole downtown Loop!”
“If I cannot hold the Core, no one will!”
Thomas roared, his thumb hovering directly over the armed switch.
“The Consortium has already launched the secondary extraction protocols.
In sixty seconds, thermite charges across the river bridges will detonate.
This city will be severed from the mainland!”
“Emma, get inside the vault!”
Vincent commanded without taking his eyes off Thomas.
“Now!”
“I am not leaving you!”
Emma shouted back, her voice echoing above the deafening alarm sirens echoing throughout the subterranean labyrinth.
Beneath their feet, the massive turbines began to screech, their bearings overloading as millions of gallons of frigid lake water surged against the emergency containment baffles.
The water level on the lower floor was rising with terrifying speed, sweeping away the fallen soldiers, lapping at the lower steps of the bridge.
“Say goodbye to your kingdom, Vincent Moretti!”
Thomas screamed, lunging forward with his dagger while slamming his thumb down onto the detonator.
Vincent met him head-on.
The two titans collided in a furious, bone-crushing struggle on the narrow steel bridge.
Vincent seized Thomas’s wrist, twisting the arm with all his strength, forcing the detonator loose.
The device bounced across the grating, sliding toward the edge of the abyss.
Thomas slashed wildly, his blade carving a bloody line across Vincent’s ribs.
Vincent grunted in pain, refused to yield, and drove a devastating knee into Thomas’s abdomen, followed by a crushing headbutt that sent the former senator stumbling backward over the low railing.
Thomas flailed, his hands catching the outer lip of the catwalk.
He dangled forty feet above the churning, razor-sharp blades of the colossal hydraulic turbines.
“Moretti!”
Thomas choked, blood dripping from his split forehead.
“Pull me up!
I have the master override codes!
Without me, the Core will enter total meltdown!”
Vincent stood at the edge, breathing heavily, blood seeping through his dark shirt, his eyes as cold and unforgiving as the frozen lake above.
“You should have stayed dead, Thomas,” Vincent whispered.
Before Vincent could reach down or step away, a sudden, deafening sonic boom ripped through the ceiling of the cavern.
A massive section of reinforced granite gave way above them, pulverized not by water, but by an ultra-high-energy kinetic strike from the surface.
Daylight—blinding, freezing winter daylight—pierced through the subterranean gloom like a spear of heaven.
Hovering directly above the newly blasted breach was an enormous, unmarked black gunship, its heavy Gatling cannons whirring to life, aiming directly down into the Core chamber.
Through the gunship’s loudspeaker, a new voice echoed—deeper, older, and infinitely more chilling than Clara Vance or Thomas Sterling:
“Well played, Vincent Moretti.
But you have only uncovered the outer shell.
Emma Ward… step into the light, or we level the entire city block above your head.”
On the catwalk, Thomas Sterling let out a horrific, dying laugh as his grip failed, plunging backward into the roaring abyss below.
Chapter 92 – Into the Firestorm
The world detonated into searing heat and blinding sulfur.
The twin incendiary rockets struck the structural pylons twenty paces north of where Vincent and Emma stood, turning iron girders into molten slag in a millisecond.
The concussive wave slammed through Vincent’s chest, lifting him off his feet and throwing him hard against the reinforced titanium jamb of the vault threshold.
Shrapnel whined through the air like hornets, cutting through steam, smoke, and shattered rock.
Through the deafening roar of the combustion, Vincent rolled onto his side, his hands clawing at the deck plates.
Blood leaked hot and viscous down his ribs where Thomas Sterling’s blade had carved him moments before, but his nervous system was flooded with pure adrenaline.
“Emma!” he roared over the howling downdraft of the gunship’s massive rotors.
Emma was already moving.
The timid waitress who had once wiped down crystal champagne glasses at the Drake Hotel was gone; in her place was a woman whose every instinct had been forged in the crucible of survival over the past weeks.
She had dropped flat against the steel grate the instant the rockets left the tubes, shielding her head with her arms.
