My sister threw a glass of liquid in my face at her wedding and laughed that it was “just a joke”—but three days later, police arrived with a lab report that exposed what she had really done. / Chapter 39 / 50

Chapter 39 - The Sovereign Fracture

The reinforced blast doors of the subterranean vault began groaning under hydraulic pressure, slowly sliding shut. The heavy granite walls vibrated as distant demolition charges detonated within the mountain's structural support pillars.

"We have to move!" I yelled, pulling Julianna to her feet.

She could barely stand. The electrical shock and the extreme cold had wrecked her motor functions, but she leaned heavily on my shoulder, dragging her feet across the frost-covered floor as we stumbled toward the secondary maintenance tunnel I had used to infiltrate the complex.

Behind us, the primary server stacks began collapsing like giant dominoes, crushed by falling slabs of concrete. Sparks and dust choked the air, turning the freezing fog into a blinding, toxic haze.

We scrambled through the narrow access hatch just as the main blast door slammed shut with the finality of a tomb.

The maintenance tunnel was an unpaved, rough-hewn stone passage that climbed steeply toward the mountain's eastern face. The ground bucked beneath our feet like the deck of a ship in a storm. Explosions rumbled through the rock, each blast closer than the last.

"I can't... Clara, leave me," Julianna panted, her knees giving out on the steep incline. "You can make it out. I'm slowing you down."

"Shut up," I snapped, hauling her back up by the collar of my jacket. "I spent the last month hating you for what you did at that wedding. I am not letting you die in a hole because our mother is a sociopath. Move!"

We clawed our way through the darkness, guided only by the faint light of my cracked phone display.

Finally, a blast of freezing alpine air hit our faces. We stumbled through the ruined outer iron grate and tumbled out onto the snow-covered slope of the mountain, tumbling twenty feet down a drift before coming to a stop against the trunk of a massive pine.

Behind us, with a terrifying, apocalyptic roar, the entire eastern rampart of Gutenberg Fortress collapsed inward. The ancient stone towers crumbled into the subterranean voids, swallowed by a massive cloud of gray dust and pulverized granite that billowed thousands of feet into the night sky.

The servers were gone. The physical records of Project Chimera were buried under hundreds of feet of solid rock.

Julianna lay in the snow beside me, staring up at the smoke rising against the stars, her chest heaving with ragged sobs.

I pulled out Marcus’s burner phone. Miraculously, the display flickered to life.

I dialed his number.

"Marcus," I whispered, my voice raw from dust and smoke. "It’s over. The server array is destroyed. The transfer was aborted. Get a medical transport to the southern slope of the Gutenberg promontory. Julianna is alive."

Marcus didn't respond with relief.

The silence on the other end of the line was heavy, suffocating, and terrifyingly cold.

"Marcus?" I called out, my stomach dropping.

"Clara," a voice answered.

It was not Marcus.