She stood behind me with my severed braid in her hand, laughing as I cried—but ten minutes later, my husband walked in with a guest who made her face go white. / Chapter 78 / 91

Chapter 78 - The Warden’s Final Testament

The explosion of sparks died down, leaving the room illuminated only by the rhythmic flashing of red emergency strobes.

Elena slumped to the floor, her eyes staring blankly at the vaulted steel ceiling, the heavy shears protruding from her sternum. The matriarch of the Sterling dynasty, the iron woman of Lake Forest who had ruled Chicago high society with an iron fist, lay dead in a puddle of lake water and hydraulic oil.

The duplicate stood above her, twitching erratically. The electrical shock had damaged her internal gyroscopes; her left arm hung limp, sparking intermittently, and the left side of her face had melted away to reveal a gleaming skull of blackened titanium and micro-servos.

"System... damage... eighteen percent," the machine’s voice droned, heavily distorted, dropping into a deep, guttural register. "Primary protocol... remains... active. Clara Vance... return to cradle."

Nicholas hauled himself to his feet, leaning heavily against the shattered glass of the cylinder behind him. His eyes fell on his mother's body, and a sound of pure agony tore from his throat. But before he could throw himself at the twitching machine, I grabbed his arm with both hands, throwing my entire weight against him.

"Nicholas, no! Look at her! You can't fight that with your bare hands!"

"She killed her!" Nicholas roared, tears cutting through the grime on his face. "She killed my mother!"

"And she will kill us both in two seconds if we don't move!" I screamed into his face, forcing him to look at me. "Elena told us to get to the ballast control! We have to sink this thing before it reaches the harbor!"

Through the wide, reinforced observation windows at the forward end of the chamber, the view was terrifying. The black leviathan had cleared the outer shoals of Lake Michigan. Ahead of us, rising out of the mist like a city of glass and fire, was the Chicago shoreline.

The ship wasn't drifting. It was on a direct, unyielding collision course with Navy Pier and the water filtration plants that supplied the entire metropolitan area.

"The ballast control," Nicholas rasped, his survival instincts finally cutting through the fog of grief. He wiped the blood from his eyes, glaring at the damaged machine as it began to drag its foot forward, its single functional eye locking onto us. "It’s two levels down. Near the keel. Arthur showed me the schematics when I was a boy... he called it the 'Scuttle Well.'"

"Go!" I shoved him toward the emergency stairwell hatch.

We dove through the heavy watertight door just as the duplicate reached the threshold. Her functional hand smashed into the steel frame, denting the half-inch plate, but Nicholas threw his shoulder against the dogging wheel, spinning it shut with frantic desperation.

*CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.*

The heavy metal door shuddered under blows that sounded like a battering ram.

"It won't hold long," Nicholas panted, his chest heaving as he secured the final latch. "That door is rated for water pressure, not a hydraulic press."

"Then we move fast," I said, my adrenaline surging, masking the burning ache in my throat.

We plunged down the narrow spiral staircase, descending deeper into the freezing darkness of the hull. The air grew colder with every step, until our breath plumed in thick white clouds and frost formed on the iron handrails.

At the bottom of the shaft lay a round, vaulted room encased in six-foot-thick bulkheads of reinforced concrete. In the center of the chamber was a raised hexagonal dais, upon which sat a single, analog command chair surrounded by brass valve wheels and archaic toggle switches.

And resting on the arm of that chair was a cassette recorder, wired directly into the vessel's primary fuel-air ballast distribution line.

A label was affixed to the tape in faded, elegant cursive: