Elena gasped, her eyes widening in sheer shock as the milky fluid emptied into her jugular. She stumbled backward, dropping the bone-saw, which clattered violently against the iron floor. Her hands clawed uselessly at her throat as her knees gave out, sending her crashing onto the flagstones beside Nia.

«You… fool,» Elena choked out, her voice rapidly thickening as the neurotoxin seized her vocal cords. «The… pulse…»

On her wrist, the tactical band monitoring her vitals began to beep with a frantic, rising pitch. The display flashed red as her heart rate spiked, then plummeted toward zero.

Nia’s lower spine erupted in an agony so intense it tore a ragged scream from her chest. The watch face on her wrist flickered violently, numbers spinning out of control before settling on a blood-red warning.

7 MINUTES REMAINING. ACCELERATED PURGE INITIATED.

«Vance, stop it!» Nia sobbed, dragging her useless legs across the stone toward her sister. «Her pulse is flatlining! It’s speeding up the countdown!»

Dr. Vance spat a mouthful of dark blood onto the floor, his chest heaving as he limped toward Nia. «It was the only way to crack her master key,» he panted, his hands trembling violently as he reached into his torn coat and pulled out a dual-pronged copper probe. «Her pulse wasn’t the lock, Nia. It was the cloak. Now that her biological signal is dead, the raw encryption port is exposed.»

«You killed her!» Nia shrieked, tears blinding her as she reached out to touch Elena’s cooling cheek.

«She used us both!» Vance roared, dropping to his knees behind Nia. «Hold still! If I hit the wrong nerve root with this bypass, the shock will stop your heart before the wiper even fires!»

Before Nia could fight him off, Vance jammed the sharp copper prongs directly into the surgical scar at the base of her spine. A white-hot lightning bolt of pure agony shattered Nia’s vision. Her back arched violently off the floor, every muscle in her body locking rigid. Standard thoughts dissolved into static as millions of terabytes of encrypted data flooded backward through her central nervous system, re-routing through the physical interface.

Through the blinding haze of pain, she heard the sound of rushing water from the pit below, followed by the heavy, splashing gasp of someone hauling themselves out of the flooded cave.

«Nia!» Alejandro’s voice echoed off the iron girders. Drenched, covered in silt, and bleeding from a deep gash on his forehead, he pulled himself over the jagged edge of the collapsed floor, his gun raised.

«Stay back, detective!» Vance warned, his fingers wrapped around the copper probe buried in Nia’s back. «I’m grounding the circuit! If you shoot me, the feed disrupts and her brain cooks!»

Alejandro froze, his chest heaving, the barrel of his weapon wavering between Vance’s forehead and the pulsing port on Nia’s spine.

3 MINUTES REMAINING.

Nia’s jaw was clamped so tight her teeth creaked, but her mind was suddenly hyper-clear. The ledger wasn’t just numbers. As the data dumped through the bypass, fragmenting imagery flashed across her retinas—satellite coordinates, offshore account routing numbers, and a list of thousands of high-profile names. But buried beneath the financial ocean, one file stood out, branded with a high-level military clearance seal.

PROJECT JANUS: PATIENT ZERO.

It wasn’t a financial ledger. It was a human trial registry. And Nia’s name wasn’t the only one on it.

«Alejandro…» Nia managed to choke out through gritted teeth, her fingers twitching as sensation slowly surged back into her hands. «The ledger… it’s not money… it’s a list of test subjects… Vance didn’t put it in me… he built me…»

Alejandro’s eyes widened slightly, a sudden, uncharacteristic shadow of guilt crossing his face. He didn’t look surprised.

«I know, Nia,» Alejandro said softly, his tone shifting from desperate lawman to cold, clinical precision. He slowly lowered his gun, pointing it not at Vance, but directly at Nia’s chest. «That’s why the Bureau sent me to make sure you never left this island alive.»

Nia’s breath hitched. The air left her lungs completely, frozen by a betrayal far colder than the storm outside.

«You…» she whispered, the copper probe in her spine humming as the transfer hit ninety percent. «You were working with them?»

«I was assigned to keep you isolated until the countdown hit zero,» Alejandro said, stepping carefully around the pit, his expression entirely devoid of the warmth he had shown her for days. «Elena was a wildcard we didn’t count on. But Vance… Vance was always supposed to finish the extraction.»

«You bastard,» Vance snarled, leaning his weight onto the probe to lock the final sequence. «She trusts you!»

«Trust is a containment variable,» Alejandro replied smoothly, thumbing back the hammer of his sidearm. «Transfer the file to my drive, Vance, or I put a bullet through her optic nerve right now.»

1 MINUTE REMAINING.

The iron floor beneath them suddenly groaned as a heavy blast of wind tore the ruined trapdoor completely off its hinges. The storm roared into the gallery, bringing with it the deafening, rhythmic thud of rotor blades chopping through the air directly above the shattered lighthouse dome.

A blinding spotlight flooded the lantern room from above, illuminating three heavily armed tactical operatives descending on fast-ropes through the broken glass roof.

«Nobody move!» a voice boomed through an external speaker overhead. «Federal asset recovery in progress!»

Alejandro cursed under his breath, swiveling his barrel toward the descending soldiers and firing three quick shots into the glare.

Taking advantage of the sudden chaos, Vance didn’t pull the drive out. Instead, with a final, desperate snarl, he slammed a red override button on the probe unit and shoved the entire live wire array deep into the emergency conduit built into the lighthouse walls.

«If they want the core, they can take all of it!» Vance screamed.

A massive electrical surge traveled from the lighthouse grid back through the probe and straight into Nia’s spine. The world went blindingly white. Nia felt her heart flatline as the entire power grid of the island spiked through her body, blowing out every lantern and light fixture in a cascade of blue sparks.

In the absolute darkness that followed, the deafening sound of a heavy body hitting the stone floor echoed over the howling wind, followed by the metallic click of a grenade pin being pulled right beside Nia’s ear.

Then, a cold, smooth voice—one she had never heard before—whispered out of the dark, mere inches from her face:

«Wake up, Subject One. Phase Two has begun.»