Chapter 54 - The Scent of Crushed Sugar
The water boiled with bubbles as the operative fought to throw Vance off. Even wounded, the mercenary was twice as strong as my brother, his gloved hands clamping onto Vance’s throat, pushing his head beneath the foul surface.
I didn't hesitate. I drove the corner of the heavy tablet down into the operative's optical mount, shattering the night-vision goggles into his eyes.
The man convulsed, his hands releasing Vance's throat. Vance breached the surface, gasping for air, vomiting black water, his eyes bloodshot with terror. I grabbed the mercenary’s dropped submachine gun from the water, checked the bolt, and swept the weapon back toward the tunnel mouth.
The second operator was ten paces behind, weapon raised.
I didn't think about morality. I didn't think about the quiet, mundane life I had lived before the party. I pulled the trigger.
The suppressed weapon shuddered against my shoulder in a rapid, muted staccato. The burst struck the second man's chest plate, throwing him off balance in the water. Before he could reorient, the structural integrity of the century-old feeder pipe above him gave way under the stray rounds.
With a deafening roar of grinding stone and wet soil, tons of dirt, gravel, and saturated marsh mud collapsed from the highway shoulder above, sealing the entrance of the drainage pipe in an impenetrable avalanche of debris.
Silence descended, broken only by the dripping of condensation and Vance's ragged, choking breaths.
We leaned against the slimy curved wall of the bypass conduit, shivering violently in the damp cold. Vance was curled into a ball, clutching his bruised throat, staring at me as if I were a ghost.
"You killed them..." he wheezed. "Rachel... you just killed two men."
"They came to slaughter us like animals, Vance," I said, my voice dead and flat. "Get up."
The glow on my wrist had shifted from cyan to a steady, deep amber. The geometric lines seemed to settle deeper into the fascia of my arm, forming an intricate, digital lattice that traced the veins up toward my elbow.
"Why me?" I stared at the amber glow, my chest heaving. "You said there was five thousand dollars in that box. But why did they need *my* blood? Why did the cake have to be crushed against my face?"
Vance stared at the ground, unable to meet my eyes. His teeth chattered violently from the cold.
"Vance. Look at me." I leveled the weapon toward him, not intending to shoot, but needing him to understand that the frightened sister he had humiliated at the dinner table was dead. "What was in the locked garage before the police raided it? What did you hide beneath the floorboards?"
He flinched, pulling his knees tighter to his chest. "It wasn't drugs, Rachel. It wasn't weapons or counterfeit money. I lied to you. I lied to Melissa. I lied to the police."
"Then what was it?"
"It was an archive," Vance whispered, his voice cracking into a sob. "Twelve cryo-storage canisters. And three hundred biological dossiers. All of them bore the exact same birthmark on their left wrists. All of them had the Sterling family crest stamped into their genetic sequencing records."
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He looked up at me, tears cutting clean lines through the dried grime on his cheeks.
"You aren't my sister, Rachel. You were never my sister."
