Chapter 134 - The Resuscitation Suite
They marched me through the bowels of the *Leviathan Prime* with zip-ties biting deep into my wrists, two guards holding my elbows while a medical team rushed Clara ahead on a gurney. The lower decks were narrow, claustrophobic corridors of exposed conduit and dripping copper pipes, maintained with the brutal, functional efficiency of a Cold War warship.
Deck Three smelled entirely different. The iron tang of the hull gave way to the sharp, chemical reek of medical-grade disinfectant, synthetic plasma, and burnt tissue.
The double doors hissed open into a pressurized clinical bay. In the center of the room, surrounded by an array of monitors displaying fluctuating electrocardiograms, sat a high-pressure hyperbaric tank. Inside the tank, suspended in a harness of clear plastic straps and immersed in a heated saline bath up to her collarbones, was Eleanor.
Her skin was the color of skimmed milk, mottled with dark purple bruising across her neck and shoulders. A mechanical ventilator was jammed down her throat, pumping rhythmically with a low, wet sigh. Tubes ran into her subclavian vein, draining dark, deoxygenated blood and replacing it with synthetic pink fluid. Her eyes were sunken, dark hollows in a skull that looked paper-thin.
Yet, as the hydraulic doors hissed shut behind me, those hollow eyes snapped open.
Even through the thick, curved acrylic of the tank, the look she gave me carried the same lethal, suffocating weight as it had across the mahogany table in Connecticut on Thanksgiving night. It was the gaze that had watched my father break my ribs without a flicker of remorse; the gaze that had told me I deserved the violence of the world simply for daring to exist outside her design.
A nurse in a biohazard smock adjusted a valve on the console. A speaker mounted above the tank crackled with static, carrying Eleanor’s voice through the glass—distorted, wet, bubbling through her trachea, but unmistakable.
"You... thought the ice... would swallow me, Emily?" she rasped. A horrific, rattling laugh vibrated through the speaker. "You think you can... overturn the table... and simply walk away?"
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"You're already dead, Eleanor," I said, standing tall between my two captors. "Look at you. You’re drowning in your own machines. The trench took the vault. It took your archives, your money, your sister. You’re floating in an aquarium on a dying ship."
"The money... was never in the stone, you fool," Eleanor whispered, her lips curling over gray, blood-slick teeth. "The money... is in the blood. Bring the girl here."
