Chapter 60 - The Eclipse Over High Ridge
I slammed the train's pneumatic brakes. Sparks showered from the iron wheels, shrieking against the rusted rails as the shunter ground to a halt fifty yards from the bunker's perimeter fence.
"Someone beat us here," Clara whispered, raising her weapon, her body instantly tense.
"Not just someone," I said, staring at the vehicle. "That transport belongs to the executor of my father's will. That's Harrison's car."
Harrison had been my family's chief legal counsel for thirty-five years. He was the man who had drawn up the guardianship papers for Mia and Lily after my bride’s betrayal. He was the only person outside of myself who possessed the emergency routing codes to the High Ridge bunker.
"Stay behind me," I ordered, lifting Lily while Clara took Mia. We moved quickly across the gravel apron, keeping low behind the concrete blast walls until we reached the open threshold of the bunker.
Inside, the relay station hummed with life. Someone had brought a mobile tactical generator online. The fluorescent lights overhead flickered with a sterile, white glare, and the cooling fans of the high-capacity server banks were screaming as they processed massive streams of data.
In the center of the main communications room, standing before the glowing array of transmission monitors, stood a woman dressed in an impeccably tailored charcoal coat. Her silver hair was pinned back in an austere, aristocratic twist, and she held a porcelain tea cup in one hand as if she were sitting in a Parisian salon.
Beside her lay Harrison, collapsed on the concrete floor in a pool of dark, spreading blood, his chest motionless.
The woman didn't turn around as our footsteps echoed across the threshold.
"You have your father’s stubbornness, Julian," she said, her voice smooth, refined, and entirely devoid of human warmth. "He, too, believed that iron and blood were sufficient to protect what he built."
She turned slowly. It was Cynthia Vance.
In her other hand, she wasn't holding a weapon. She was holding a duplicate of the floral handbag—identical down to the last hand-stitched silk blossom, except the hardware was not brass, but polished obsidian.
"Aunt Cynthia," I whispered, raising my weapon to center mass.
"Put it down, Julian," she said softly, gesturing toward the master screen behind her.
On the monitor, an upload progress bar stood at 94%.
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"Did you really believe the cold-storage card was meant to expose us?" she smiled, a thin, predatory curve of her lips. "The card wasn't an archive. It was a digital trigger. The moment you connected it to your satellite terminal in the salt mill, it routed the sovereign authorization codes directly to this relay station. You didn't escape our trap, nephew. You carried the firing pin straight to the cannon."
Behind us, outside the bunker, the deafening roar of three heavy gunships shook the foundations of the concrete mountain. The sky turned black as the shadows of their fuselages eclipsed the morning sun, and the blast doors behind us began to slide shut, locking us into the dark.
