Chapter 87 - The Broken Vow
I looked at the stylus. It was warm to the touch, humming with an internal frequency that resonated sickeningly with the scar at the base of my neck.
Then I looked at Nicholas. His face was pale, his tactical vest scorched and soaked with freezing bilge water, his eyes pleading with me—not for his own life, but for the soul he knew I would lose if I surrendered to his mother.
"Clara," he whispered, his voice trembling. "We made a vow. At the altar, before she pulled the shears. In sickness and in health. Till death do us part."
"Nicholas..."
"If we die here, we die as human beings," he said, stepping between me and Miriam, his back to me, facing his mother down. "We don't buy our survival with a million drownings."
"How poetic," Miriam sneered, her hand slipping into the folds of her emerald dress. "And how utterly predictable. You always took after your father, Nicholas. Weak-willed. Sentimental. An absolute failure of the genetic imperative."
In a blur of unnatural speed, Miriam’s hand emerged from her robe.
She wasn't holding a firearm. She was holding a slender, carbon-fiber rod that flared with a blinding arc of blue electricity.
She struck Nicholas directly in the sternum.
The concussive neural discharge hurled Nicholas backward. His gun flew across the marble floor, skittering into the dark shadows beneath the banquet table. His body hit the glass bulkhead with a sickening crunch, convulsing violently as the electric payload scrambled his autonomic nervous system.
"Nicholas!" I screamed, lunging toward him.
Miriam’s hand caught my throat with the crushing force of a hydraulic clamp.
Her fingers weren't flesh. Beneath the thin synthetic skin of her fingers, the cold, unyielding architecture of titanium pistons locked around my windpipe.
"You have mistaken my patience for weakness, girl," she hissed, her face inches from mine, the elegant mask fully stripped away. "You think you have a choice? Your father encoded the sequence into your DNA, but the neural interface doesn't require your willing participation. It only requires your brain stem to be active."
She raised the stylus, the tip glowing with an ominous crimson light, aiming it directly at the raw, tender scar at the back of my neck.
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"Hold still, my dear," she whispered. "This will only hurt for a lifetime."
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