Chapter 1002
Liam drew a breath. “Hey! You wrinkled old prune! You think you’re a god? You’re just a lonely old man with a frozen —”
The Administrator’s face twitched. “Silence him.”
While the guards swung their attention to Liam, Alistair reached into his vest and produced a grenade — not a fragmentation round, but a flashbang.
“Cover your eyes!” Alistair shouted.
𝖳𝗵𝗲 𝘮𝗈𝘀t 𝗽оp𝗎l𝘢𝗋 𝗇𝗼𝘃e𝗹𝗌 𝗈𝗇 g𝗮𝗅𝗇𝗼𝘃e𝘭𝗌.с𝘰m
He threw it.
The flash was blinding, a white detonation that swallowed the room. Guards on the balcony screamed, clutching their faces.
Skye didn’t run for the exit. She ran for the pod.
She seized a heavy metal canister from the floor — a nitrogen tank — and drove it into the glass wall.
The glass spiderwebbed on impact.
“Stop!” the Administrator screamed, his voice cracking with genuine panic. “Don’t touch her!”
Skye swung again.
The glass shattered. She climbed through the shards and stood beside the pod, pulling the Ouroboros key from her pocket. She pressed the sharp end of the key against the glass faceplate of the coffin.
“Open the doors!” Skye screamed. “Or I destroy her face. I’ll carve her up so badly that even hell won’t recognize her!”
The guards raised their weapons, but the Administrator waved them down with frantic urgency. “No! Don’t shoot — you might hit the pod!”
“Open the doors!” Skye pressed the key harder. The faceplate glass gave a low, resonant creak.
The Administrator was trembling. He looked at the frozen woman, then at Skye. The resemblance between them was uncanny — he was looking at his past and his future, and they were at war with each other.
“Open them,” the Administrator whispered.
Defeat had a sound. This was it.
The heavy doors groaned and began to slide apart.
“Go!” Skye shouted.
Julian drove his chair toward the exit. Liam grabbed Alistair by the arm and pulled him along.
“Skye, come on!” Liam yelled.
“I’m right behind you,” Skye said.
She waited until they were through the door. Then she looked up at the old man on the observation deck one final time.
“She’s dead,” Skye said. “And she’s never coming back.”
She didn’t simply leave. She had noticed the exposed cooling pipes running alongside the pod — the volatile liquid nitrogen lines. She pulled the pin from a fragmentation grenade she had taken from Alistair’s vest and dropped it directly onto the main pressure valve.
Then she ran.
“No!” The Administrator’s scream was the sound of a soul breaking apart.
Skye dove through the door just as it began to grind shut behind her.
The grenade ruptured the high-pressure tank. The explosion was contained, but enormous — a concussive wave that rolled through the tunnel and knocked all of them to the ground.
Dust poured from the ceiling of the tunnel. The mountain was groaning around them.
“You hit the main cooling array!” Julian shouted over the rumble. “Liquid nitrogen is flooding the superstructure — it’s freezing the support columns instantly. They’re shattering under the thermal shock!”
“Run!” Alistair grabbed Skye’s hand.
They sprinted back up the sloping tunnel. The floor buckled beneath their feet. Chunks of obsidian rained from the walls.
.