Chapter 91 - The Frequency of Ghost Mountain
The sun had barely broken through the leaden winter sky outside, casting cold, gray shafts of light across the courtroom floor as Victoria Vance was led away in chains through the rear prisoner holding door. Her attorneys followed in terrified silence, surrounded by federal agents carrying boxes of seized financial records out into the corridor.
I stood alone at the counsel table, gently wrapping the ancestral deeds and the wire recording back into the soft satin interior of the unburned bag. The ordeal was over. My daughter’s name was cleared, her father’s memory was redeemed, and our home on Miller’s Ridge was safe forever from the foreclosure wolves who had stalked us for months.
Or so I believed.
As I pulled the zipper closed, a low, barely perceptible vibration began to hum through the solid oak of the table.
I stopped.
The tactical commander, who was standing by the courtroom exit, suddenly pressed a finger to his ear piece, his face going rigid beneath his raised visor.
"Say that again, Base," he muttered into his throat mic. "Repeat transmission."
The vibration grew stronger. Across the room, the heavy glass chandeliers hanging from the high plaster ceiling began to sway gently, their crystal pendants chiming against one another like distant wind chimes. The water in the carafe on the judge's bench began to ripple in tight, concentric circles.
"Ma'am," the commander said, his voice dropping into an urgent, low register as he turned back toward me. "Did you remove everything from the bottom compartment of that bag?"
"Yes," I said, my pulse suddenly spiking. "The deeds, the wire recording, the brass cylinder—"
"Check the lining."
My hands shook as I reached back into the purse. My fingers pressed against the structured bottom panel. Beneath the padded silk, I felt a hard, rectangular shape that hadn't been there when I opened it in the basement boiler room.
I worked my thumb along the seam. A hidden magnetic strip gave way with a soft click.
I pulled out a small, polished slab of deep obsidian stone—the exact non-reflective material that formed the bottomless cradle atop Ghost Mountain. Engraved upon its surface was not a name, and not a signature.
It was an active, glowing digital display, pulsing with soft emerald light, counting down from forty-seven seconds.
Directly below the timer, an address was etched in modern, laser-cut typography:
*TERMINAL TWO: THE SECOND HEIRESS.*
*LOCATION: ELEMENTARY SCHOOL — ROOM 104.*
May you like
Room 104 was my daughter Lily’s third-grade classroom.
At that exact moment, the emergency civil defense horn atop the Kane County municipal building began to wail, its apocalyptic siren tearing through the freezing winter morning. Through the high arched windows, looking out toward the northern horizon where Ghost Mountain stood, a brilliant, sky-splitting beam of emerald light shot directly into the storm clouds—and then, twenty miles to the south, from beneath the foundation of the town’s elementary school, an identical beam of light erupted into the sky to meet it.
