The screech of a heavy iron bolt sliding home outside the car doors reverberated through the cabin like a gunshot. Before Tomas could lunge across the console, a dozen tactical flashlights flared to life simultaneously from the catwalks above, bathing the interior of the sedan in blinding, clinical white light. Elena tightened her grip on Mateo, her knuckles turning bone-white as the humming light beneath her collarbone suddenly shifted from a steady pulse to a frantic, stroboscopic flash. Every automated camera lens mounted along the rusted girders of the ceiling whirred into motion, locking their infrared sights directly onto the backseat. «Stay back,» Tomas snarled, his body shielding Elena and the child as he dragged a heavy-duty tire iron out from beneath the floor panel. «If you touch them, I swear to God I’ll rip this impostor’s throat out.» The false Julian didn’t flinch. Instead, he simply tapped two fingers against the glowing network of fiber-optics exposed along his jaw, and the entire vehicle’s internal control panel flickered to life. A synthetic, genderless voice echoed from the dashboard speakers: Biometric resonance verified. Welcome home, Creator.
Elena gasped as the floorboards beneath their feet began to shudder and drop. With a deafening metallic groan, the section of concrete flooring beneath the sedan detached from the foundation, sliding backward into a subterranean access shaft like a descending elevator platform. The sudden drop threw Tomas against the front dashboard, knocking the wind from his lungs as darkness swallowed them whole. Cold, subterranean air rushed up to meet them, thick with the smell of ozone, sterile antiseptic, and something metallic that tasted suspiciously like copper. As the platform ground to a halt fifty feet below, the overhead floodlights snapped on one by one, revealing a vast, subterranean laboratory that spanned the entire footprint of the shipyard. Rows of cryogenic stasis pods lined the perimeter, and inside the closest one, suspended in a pale amber fluid, was the real Julian Vance—eyes open, breathing slowly, and hooked up to a tangle of thick cables that fed directly into a massive mainframe at the center of the room.
Tomas scrambled to his feet, pulling Elena and the baby off the platform and onto the slick concrete floor. «Julian!» Tomas shouted toward the glass pod, banging his fist against the reinforced exterior. The man inside didn’t blink, but the monitor beside his stasis tank began to scroll lines of rapid green code. «He can’t hear you,» a sharp voice echoed from the shadows near the mainframe. A woman stepped into the light, wearing a pristine white lab coat free of dust or ash, her silver hair pulled back into a severe bun. In her hands, she held a data-slate flashing with the exact telemetry of Elena’s pulsing collarbone. «You didn’t break the system, Administrator,» the woman said, a cold, humorless smile touching her lips as she looked directly at Tomas. «You just gave it full administrative privileges. And right now, the system’s primary directive isn’t to purge the contamination…» She paused, stepping closer as Elena’s body went rigid in Tomas’s arms, her eyes rolling back into her head as a torrent of digital data projected directly from her retinas onto the sterile white wall behind them. «…it’s to download the child into the grid.»