MY GRANDMOTHER GAVE ME $500 FOR CHRISTMAS. THEN SHE LOOKED AT MY MOTHER AND SAID FIVE WORDS THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING.

"Nola!"

Maeve’s voice came from the open doorway of the center refrigerator car.

I spun around, my chest heaving, the pry bar dripping with Blackwood’s blood.

Maeve stood in the doorway, framed by the pale, cold interior of the modified rail car. Behind her, rows of rack-mounted server units blinked with hundreds of green and amber LEDs, powered by an internal battery bank that hummed like a hive of angry hornets. In her right hand, she held an automatic pistol, aimed directly at my chest.

"Step away from him, darling," Maeve said, her voice trembling slightly now. Her tactical cool was finally cracking. "Step away, or I swear to God I’ll put a hole through you."

"You won't shoot me, Maeve," I said, taking a slow step toward the train door. "You need my eye. You need my blood. If I die out here in the snow, your forty billion dollars stays locked in that metal box forever."

Maeve’s finger tightened on the trigger, her knuckles whitening. "I only need one of you, Nola. Clara is fifty yards down that ditch. A mother will do anything to keep her daughter alive—including pressing her face against a biometric scanner."

"She won't have to," a quiet voice spoke from the shadows beneath the water tower.

Ruth stepped forward into the amber glow of the burning generator.

She wasn't running. She wasn't hiding. She walked with slow, deliberate steps across the snow, her canvas handbag hanging over her arm, her eyes locked onto Maeve. Behind her, Clara followed, holding Julian’s pistol in both hands, her aim unwavering.

"Ruth," Maeve hissed, her gun swinging toward the old woman. "Don't come any closer."

"You were always so impatient, Maeve," Ruth said softly, stopping ten feet from the train car door. "Arthur told me the day we brought you home from Bucharest that you had a fire in your belly. He loved that about you. He thought fire meant strength. But fire is stupid, Maeve. Fire consumes everything until there's nothing left to burn, and then it dies in the cold."

"Save the grandmotherly lecture!" Maeve shouted, her voice echoing off the frozen pines. "Arthur gave me the master code! He gave me the keys!"

"He gave you a seed string, child," Ruth said, reaching into her coat pocket.

Maeve instantly raised the pistol higher. "Hands where I can see them!"

Ruth pulled her hand from her pocket. She wasn't holding a weapon.

She was holding an antique, gold-plated pocket watch with a cracked crystal face. She pressed the release button on top. The front cover snapped open with a soft, delicate *ping*.

Inside the lid wasn't a watch mechanism. It was a circular, glass-encased prism—the original optical key for the sovereign mainframe.

"Arthur didn't trust you, Maeve," Ruth whispered. "Arthur didn't trust anyone. He gave you half the sequence so you would keep Blackwood occupied while the clock ran out. And he gave me the prism so that when the day came, I could choose whether our family lived... or vanished."

Maeve stared at the gold watch in Ruth's hand, her breathing rapid and shallow. "Give it to me, Ruth. Give it to me, and I’ll leave the state. You, Clara, Nola—you can take the blue car. You can disappear into Canada. Nobody will ever look for you."

"We've been disappearing for thirty years, Maeve," Clara said, stepping forward beside her mother, the pistol steady in her grip. "I lived in a trailer when Nola was three years old because you and my father took every dollar of the family estate to buy protection in Zurich. You don't get to offer us freedom."

"Give it to me!" Maeve screamed, lunging forward out of the train car toward the gold watch.

Ruth didn't pull back.

With a movement shockingly swift, Ruth hurled the gold pocket watch not toward Maeve, but straight down into the pool of burning fuel that was spreading across the frozen gravel beneath the train's diesel fuel tank.

"No!" Maeve shrieked, diving toward the flames in a desperate, frantic scramble.

Clara fired.

The single gunshot cracked through the clearing like a lightning strike.

Maeve stumbled mid-lunge, her eyes flying wide in shock. The bullet struck her center mass, tearing through her tactical vest at point-blank range. She crashed to her knees in the snow, her hands clutching her chest, gasping for air that wouldn't come.

She looked up at Clara, her eyes filled with an incomprehensible mixture of rage and betrayal.

"Clara..." Maeve choked out, blood spilling over her lips. "You... you don't know... what you've started..."

Maeve collapsed face-forward into the snow, motionless.

Ruth stood over the burning puddle. The gold watch was already blackening in the intense heat, the delicate optical prism inside fracturing into microscopic dust under the fury of the diesel fire.

"It's over," Clara whispered, the pistol slipping from her trembling fingers and landing softly in the snow. She fell to her knees, burying her face in her hands, her whole body racking with sobs. "It's finally over."

Ruth looked at the burning train car, her face illuminated by the dancing orange flames.