Chapter 10 - Blood in the Water
Muffled gunfire ripped through the darkness, muzzle flashes illuminating the rusted rafters in strobe-like bursts. Eleanor moved like a wraith through the shadows she knew so well. She had funded the security architecture of the Vance facilities; she knew every blind spot, every structural weakness.
She fired two shots from behind a rusted transformer box, dropping the first guard from the upper catwalk into the churning water below. The second guard panicked, spraying wild automatic fire across the steel walkway before Eleanor flanked him from the access ladder, her third shot ending the firefight in an instant.
Silence fell over the station, broken only by the roar of the incoming tide and Clara's desperate, choking gasps.
"Eleanor!" Clara sputtered, spitting out brackish water that was now lapping at her chin. "Eleanor, behind you!"
Eleanor spun around, raising her weapon, but a heavy iron pipe struck her across the forearm, sending the pistol clattering down into the murky depths below.
Standing before her in the dim emergency light was Marcus’s chief fixer—a massive, scarred operative known only as Vance’s personal butcher.
"The boss said the girl was the priority, but your head carried a separate bonus," the giant snarled, lunging forward with a serrated combat knife.
Eleanor ducked beneath the wild horizontal slash, driving her heel into the man's instep, but his size and momentum drove her hard against the slick concrete wall. His hands locked around her throat, cutting off her oxygen as he pushed her backward toward the rising reservoir basin.
Through blurred vision, Eleanor saw the iron control panel five feet away. The manual floodgate release lever painted in peeling yellow stripes.
Gasping for breath, she clawed at his face with one hand while reaching into her coat pocket with the other. Her fingers found the heavy brass utility wrench she had taken from the roof. With a feral scream, she drove the pointed iron edge directly into the man’s collarbone.
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He roared in agony, his grip loosening. Eleanor twisted away, lunged for the hydraulic panel, and threw her entire body weight onto the manual emergency lever.
With a deafening groan of ancient gears, the secondary sluice gates swung violently outward. A massive whirlpool formed in an instant, and the surging torrent swept the operative off his feet, dragging him down into the subterranean ocean exhaust before he could even scream.
