Chapter 129 - Beneath the Mahogany Floor
"The pod only holds two," Vance said immediately, his voice flat, devoid of fear. He let go of my shoulder, leaning his back against the iron bulkhead, his weapon falling to the steel grate with a metallic clatter. "You and Clara. Take her and launch."
"Shut up, Vance," I hissed, grabbing his tactical harness. "We don't leave people behind."
"Look at the displacement gauge, Emily!" Vance shouted, pointing a bloodied finger at the pod’s digital control panel. "It’s a high-pressure kinetic capsule. If the gross payload exceeds three hundred and twenty pounds, the thermal ascent boosters won't achieve escape velocity against the shelf current. We will sink straight to the ocean floor and implode. You know the math!"
I looked at the console. The red digits confirmed it: *MAX LOAD: 150 KG.*
Vance weighed two hundred pounds alone in his tactical gear. I was one hundred and thirty. Clara was forty. Sarah was identical to me.
There was no configuration where all four of us survived.
The water was already up to our ankles, freezing cold, numbing our feet within seconds. The lights along the conduit flickered, dying one by one as the sub-station generators flooded. The only illumination came from the emergency strobes of the escape pod, casting pulsing red shadows across our faces.
Sarah set Clara down on the dry ledge inside the pod's hatch. She stood up straight, smoothing down the front of her torn black jacket, her eyes meeting mine through the crimson mist of the alarms.
"The cipher codes in your head," Sarah said quietly, her voice perfectly level, completely stripped of panic. "They control the offshore liquidation funds. Without them, Eleanor can't pay the deep-shelf rescue tenders to retrieve her private lift."
"Sarah..." I started.
"I was grown to replace you, Emily," she interrupted, stepping back toward the rushing black water that was now rising toward our knees. "I spent my life in a white room in the Alps, reading books about financial theory, watching surveillance footage of you walking home from school, hating you because you were allowed to be dirty. I hated you because you had scars. I thought Eleanor loved me because she kept me clean."
Sarah reached down, picked up Vance’s discarded rifle, and slung it over her shoulder with an easy, practiced grace.
"She didn't keep me clean because she loved me," Sarah said, a faint, bitter smile touching her lips—the exact same smile I had seen on my own face in the mirror after surviving the crash in Tromsø. "She kept me clean so my organs wouldn't be rejected."
She stepped into the freezing torrent, her boots planting firmly in the center of the conduit.
"Put the sergeant in the pod," Sarah commanded, looking back at me. "I’ll trigger the manual purge from the external ballast console down the hall. It will clear the launch tube of hydrostatic backpressure. But it has to be held from the outside."
"You don't owe me anything," I choked out, the freezing spray hitting my face.
May you like
"I don't owe you anything," Sarah agreed, her eyes locking onto mine with the fierce, unbreakable resolve of a Sterling daughter. "I owe her. Tell our mother... that the seed she planted in the dark was just as poisonous as the one she left in the light."
***
