THE VAULT BENEATH OUR BONES

"Lower the gun, El," Mark said softly, his palms open, facing her. He took half a step forward, the water from his soaked suit dripping onto the linoleum with rhythmic taps. "Look at me. It’s me. It’s Mark. The grid is back on. Lily is safe. Look at her—she’s standing right there."

Elena didn't lower the weapon. Her knuckles remained white around the checkered wood grip. "You don't understand, Mark. You never understood. You were never supposed to know about this room. You were never supposed to touch that wall."

"David is down there," Mark said, his voice cracking on his brother's name. "In the water. Under the pipes."

Elena’s jaw tightened, a microscopic twitch betraying the stone mask of her face. "David was reckless. He thought we could just run. He thought we could walk into a police precinct and hand over the research papers like this was an ordinary corporate fraud case. He didn't understand the reach of the people funding Sterling. If David had talked, they wouldn't have just taken Lily. They would have scrubbed us from existence."

"So what did you do?" Mark whispered, horror dawning behind his eyes. "Sterling said someone shot him. Sterling didn't shoot David, did he?"

Elena took a slow, agonizing breath. Her gaze flicked toward Lily, who remained stationary in the doorway, staring down at Sterling’s body with clinical detachment.

"David was going to shut the power down completely," Elena said, her voice dropping into an icy whisper. "He knew what it would do to her. He said it was better for her to die peacefully in her sleep than to become whatever it was Sterling was growing inside her mind. He was standing by that hatch with a crowbar, trying to rupture the primary core."

She raised the gun slightly, aligning the iron sights directly with Mark’s chest.

"I had to protect my daughter, Mark. Even from your brother."

A sickening chill swept through Mark’s veins, far colder than the runoff water in the reactor chamber. "You killed him. You killed David, dumped him in the sump, and then you used his identity to buy this house at auction so you could monitor the array yourself."

"I did what a mother has to do!" she screamed, the facade finally cracking into jagged shards of hysteria. "I kept her alive! For seven years, I kept her alive!"

"Mommy," Lily’s small voice piped up from the hallway.

Elena didn't break her stance, but her eyes darted toward the little girl. "Stay there, sweetheart. Mommy is handling it."

"Mommy, the screen is talking," Lily said, pointing to the central console behind Sterling’s corpse.