Chapter 29 - The Shattered Covenant
The concussive force of the blast threw me to my knees. The air was sucked from my lungs, replaced by the burning taste of black powder and sulfur. Julian lay crumpled against the base of the bronze door, his pistol sliding uselessly into the drainage gutter that ran around the perimeter of the rotunda. He wasn't dead, but his right shoulder was mangled, his breath coming in short, agonizing wheezes.
Eleanor was on the floor three yards away, her elegant suit coated in gray dust, her emerald cane shattered in two pieces beside her. The buckshot had missed her, but the sheer kinetic violence of the blast had knocked her off her feet, stripping away every vestige of her aristocratic dignity.
Above us, Arthur leaned over the ruined catwalk, coughing violently, dark blood splattering the iron floorplates between his shoes. The massive recoil of the ten-gauge had broken his collarbone; his left arm hung limp at his side, and the shotgun slipped from his useless fingers, clattering onto the marble below with a heavy metallic clang.
"Get out, Leah," Arthur wheezed, his voice barely audible over the ringing in my ears. "The tunnel leads to the old City Hall spur. There's a maintenance crew at the terminus. They have instructions to let you through."
"What about you?" I shouted through the haze, rising to my feet, my body aching from the impacts.
"I am the inventory, Leah," he whispered, looking down at Eleanor as she scrambled on her hands and knees toward the inner vault door. "The inventory must stay with the vault."
"Arthur, open the secondary latch!" Eleanor screamed, her voice cracking into madness as she reached the bronze door. She pulled a heavy brass cylinder from her pocket—the master key she had guarded for three decades—and jammed it into the manual keyway above the biometric scanner. "You cannot destroy it! It belongs to the syndicate! It belongs to me!"
"It belongs to the sea, mother," Arthur said quietly.
From inside his coat, Arthur produced a small, battered black box—the remote detonator for the structural charges the Army Corps of Engineers had installed beneath the building's retaining walls during the foundation repairs of 1978.
"No!" Julian choked out from the floor, his bloody fingers clawing at the stone. "Arthur, the foundations—the entire harbor shelf will drop—"
"Leah, run!" Arthur roared, his face contorted in a final, agonizing spasm of will.
I turned and dove into the maintenance hatch.
The transition from the violent noise of the rotunda into the narrow, iron-ribbed shaft was like plunging into ice water. The air was freezing, thick with the smell of wet soot and century-old grease. I scrambled forward on my hands and knees, the sharp rivets of the ventilation duct tearing through the knees of my trousers, my eyes straining against the absolute darkness ahead.
"Maisie!" I screamed into the black void. "Maisie, answer me!"
"Mommy! I'm here! I'm at the ladder!"
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Her small voice echoed back through the iron pipe, thin and terrified, but clear. Five yards ahead, the dim, yellow glow of an auxiliary emergency lantern marked the end of the maintenance hatch, where it opened onto a vertical steel ladder descending into the forgotten trackways of the Manhattan transit system.
Behind me, the world ended.
