Chapter 9 - The Man in the Wall
Mark froze, suspended in the chest-deep water, the yellow valve wheel just inches from his fingers. His flashlight illuminated the bleached white bone of the skull, the gaping mouth frozen in an eternal scream. The remains were wedged tightly behind the pipework, partially covered by silt and algae.
"Sterling," Mark whispered, his voice trembling through the radio. "Who is down here with me?"
A long pause hung on the line. The only sound was the rhythmic hiss-click of Mark’s regulator and the distant, muffled thrum of the dying generators above.
"Focus on the valve, Mr. Vance," Sterling said quietly.
"Who is this?!" Mark screamed, the terror and adrenaline boiling over into raw fury. "There’s a dead man tied to the cooling lines! He’s got a hole in his head!"
"That is David," Sterling replied flatly. "The man whose name was on the intercom. The man whose daughter you are raising."
The water felt like it was turning to solid ice around Mark’s chest. "What did you say?"
"Elena didn't tell you, did she?" Sterling’s voice sounded tired, stripped of its clinical arrogance. "She couldn't. The non-disclosure agreements were backed by severe physical enforcement. Six years ago, David Vance—your older brother—stole the prototype neural embryo from our facility. He intended to expose the project to the Department of Justice. Elena helped him. She was our lead embryologist before she erased her credentials and ran away with you."
The room spun. Mark looked down at the skeletal hands curled around the pipe. David. His brother, who had supposedly vanished seven years ago after a botched hiking trip in the Cascades. The brother whose memorial service had been an empty casket.
"You brought her here," Mark breathed, the world tilting completely off its axis. "You didn't target me. You targeted Elena."
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"She hid the child in the general population, using you as an unwitting shield of domestic normalcy," Sterling whispered. "She believed that if the child grew up in an unregistered zone, the neural bridge would decay naturally. But it didn't decay. It starved. David came back here three months ago to destroy the primary grid so she could be free. I had to ensure the continuity of the experiment. Now, turn the valve, Mark. Unless you want your brother’s sacrifice—and your daughter’s life—to end in the next fourteen minutes."
Above him, Mark heard the faint, muffled sound of a gunshot ringing out through the concrete ceiling from Level Three.
