Chapter 90 - The Descent into the Maw
We were thrown across the ballroom as gravity violently shifted.
Tables, crystal glasses, and the heavy vitrines containing the remnants of our past smashed against the reinforced bulkheads. Nicholas slid across the inclined carpet, throwing his body across mine just as a shower of shattered glass rained down from the ceiling.
"Hold on to the deck ribs!" he shouted, wrapping one arm around a structural steel pillar and the other around my waist.
Miriam had locked herself into a hydraulic command harness at the upper podium. Her dress was shredded, her left arm sparking, her face twisted into a mask of triumphant insanity as she watched the submersibles around us flood with ballast water.
The leviathan was descending into a yawning black fissure in the lakebed—a chasm far deeper than the natural geology of Lake Michigan should have allowed. It was an artificial abyss, carved by decades of secret industrial tunneling, plunging down into the earth's mantle.
The hull groaned under astronomical atmospheric pressures. The sound was like a chorus of screaming whales, the steel plates buckling and groaning as the depth gauges flickered: *1,000 feet... 2,000 feet... 4,000 feet...*
"Nicholas!" I yelled, fighting the centrifugal force that threatened to rip me from his grip. "The console! The master override on the podium—if she finishes the descent protocol, the bore seals behind us!"
"I can't reach the trigger from here!" Nicholas shouted back, his boots slipping against the polished marble. "The incline is too steep!"
"Then help me jump!"
"Clara, no—she'll tear you apart!"
"She's running on half her power grid!" I yelled, showing him the chrome shears in my fist, covered in her synthetic fluid. "She's blind on her left side. Throw me!"
Nicholas looked at me, the terror in his eyes warring with an understanding that went deeper than words. He knew there was no other way. If we didn't stop Miriam now, we would be buried miles beneath the continent, harvested in the dark.
"On three," he said through grit teeth. "One... two... NOW!"
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Nicholas surged upward, using every ounce of his remaining strength to heave me across the tilted, ruined ballroom.
***
