The click of the rear door locks echoed like a gavel dropping in a courtroom, sealing them inside the speeding vehicle as the rain lashed violently against the bulletproof glass. Tomas threw his shoulder against the door handle, but the mechanism refused to yield, held fast by Julian’s master override from the front console. «Open the door, you paranoid bastard!» Tomas bellowed, his fist slamming into the Plexiglas partition separating the front and back seats with a sickening thud. «We’re entering the quarantine zone,» Julian replied, his voice chillingly calm as he jerked the steering wheel hard to the left.

The sedan careened down an off-ramp leading straight toward the abandoned shipyard district, dodging a barricade of rusted shipping containers. In the backseat, Elena clutched Mateo tighter against her chest, her breathing coming in ragged, shallow gasps. The yellow light beneath her collarbone pulsed brighter, searing her skin with a hot, electric hum that made her vision swim with white-hot static. «Tomas… I can’t feel my arms,» Elena whimpered, her fingers going completely slack as the synthetic tissue in her shoulders began to lock up. «The baby… take him, please!» «Don’t you dare close your eyes!» Tomas shouted, abandoning his assault on the door to pull her into his arms.

He stared down at the bleeding wound on his own hand, then looked at the glowing scar on her neck. With a guttural cry of desperation, he reached for the blood-smeared wrist-reader that lay discarded on the floor mat between his boots. The device was still playing the loop of his own face condemning her to death. He jabbed his thumb onto the biometric scanner, hoping against hope that his real identity could override whatever ghost in the machine was manipulating the files. The screen flickered violently, flashing from red to a steady, glowing blue.

BIOMETRIC MATCH CONFIRMED. WELCOME, ADMINISTRATOR. PURGE SEQUENCE INTERRUPTED AT 89%.

Elena gasped, color violently rushing back into her cheeks as the paralyzing numbness receded from her limbs. But the relief was short-lived. The moment the reader bypassed the purge, a new file automatically unzipped on the screen, displaying a live satellite feed of the very warehouse they were speeding toward. There, standing on the rooftop surrounded by a dozen armed tactical operatives, was an exact duplicate of Julian Vance. Tomas slowly lifted his head, his gray eyes locking onto the back of the driver’s headrest with murder in his gaze. «Care to explain which twin you are?» Julian didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he slammed on the brakes, sending the sedan into a violent, smoking skid that brought it crashing through a chain-link gate and straight into the dark, cavernous bay of Warehouse 4. The engine died, plunging them into absolute, echoing silence save for the hissing radiator and the patter of rain leaking through the corrugated iron roof. Slowly, the driver turned around in his seat. The man in the charcoal suit smiled, but the subtle crook in his nose was gone. It was a prosthetic. «I’m not Julian,» the impostor whispered softly, peeling away the latex edge of his jawline to reveal a terrifying, spider-web network of glowing subcutaneous fiber-optics beneath his skin. «I am the Genesis Protocol’s primary archive. And you just brought the key right to the vault door.»