Chapter 60 - The Severed Line
Black-clad mercenaries with full tactical rebreathers poured through the smoke, their automatic weapons barking in suppressed bursts that chipped the concrete pillars around them.
The magistrate dropped behind an industrial transformer, firing in disciplined double-taps to suppress the advance. "Get to the surface! The extraction bird is still holding pattern above the storm!"
"We don't leave you!" Daniel yelled, ducking behind a steel support beam, shielding both boys beneath his torso.
"You have what Claire died to protect!" the magistrate yelled back, reloading his rifle with mechanical speed. "And what her masters will burn the ocean to recover! Go, Reid! Protect your sons!"
Daniel squeezed the magistrate’s shoulder, then dragged Leo and the shivering boy toward the auxiliary freight cage. He slammed the manual lever. The steel cage shuddered and began to ascend through a narrow emergency conduit just as a grenade detonated in the chamber below, engulfing the transformer in a blinding orange inferno.
The magistrate’s gunfire ceased.
The freight lift groaned under the immense strain, rising through the dark shaft while freezing seawater poured down around them from fractured cooling pipes. The boy in Daniel's coat looked up, his hazel eyes wide with raw, unfathomable confusion.
"Dad?" the boy whispered, his voice cracked and weak, sounding like a recording pulled from seven years in the past.
Daniel held him tighter, while Leo gripped his brother’s cold hand.
"I'm here," Daniel said, his voice breaking. "Both of you. I'm right here."
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The lift slammed into the surface deck with a bone-jarring crash. The emergency cage doors gave way, spilling them out onto the storm-swept helipad of Platform Null-Seven. The sky was an apocalypse of black clouds, freezing rain, and lightning.
The extraction helicopter was nowhere to be seen.
