By the time my husband finally came home, our three-year-old daughter had already been buried / Chapter 28 / 121

Chapter 28 - The Ghost Protocol

"You wouldn't," Jonathan whispered, his composed facade cracking for the first time. "If you detonate this room, the enzyme is destroyed. Your daughter dies."

"She dies anyway if I give her to you," I said, rising slowly to my feet despite the guards’ hands on my shoulders. "You think you understand maternal love, Jonathan? You think it’s a biological weakness you can quantify in a lab? Let me educate you. A mother will burn the entire world to ash if it means keeping the monsters away from her child."

"Kill her," Jonathan barked, stepping back toward the exit. "Kill them both!"

I pressed the button.

*BEEP.*

A blinding flash of white fire erupted from the refrigeration chassis. The concussive blast blew the vault doors off their hinges, sending shockwaves through the reinforced concrete walls. The heavy iron door swung violently inward, crushing the two guards behind me under tons of screaming metal.

The room filled with blinding, choking smoke and the roar of escaping natural gas.

I didn't hesitate. I rolled across the floor, shielding my face from the raining debris, and lunged into the heart of the fire.

The titanium casing of the refrigeration unit was scorched black, but the internal emergency compartment had deployed its fireproof shielding. Through the cracked heat-resistant glass, I saw one solitary ampoule still intact, glowing with an unearthly, pristine blue light.

The other two had shattered, their precious fluid boiling away into the flames.

*One dose.*

I grabbed the searing hot metal ampoule with my bare hands, ignoring the sickening sizzle of my own flesh burning. I shoved the tube into my inner pocket, pulled Andrew’s limp body by the collar of his coat, and dragged him backward through the billowing smoke toward the service canal exit.

Gunfire erupted behind us. Jonathan’s operatives were firing blindly into the fog and fire. A round ripped through my thigh, a blinding jolt of white-hot agony that nearly dropped me to my knees.

I bit down on my tongue until blood filled my mouth, using the pain to stay conscious.

"Andrew! Wake up! Wake up, damn you!" I slapped his face violently as we tumbled down the stone steps into the dark water of the drainage canal.

Andrew gasped, sputtering water, his eyes fluttering open against the darkness. "Clara...?"

"Swim!" I screamed, wrapping his arm around my neck as the customs house above us began to collapse under secondary gas explosions. "Swim or we die here!"

We plunged into the freezing canal, the current dragging us away into the labyrinth of storm drains beneath the city. Behind us, the burning customs house lit up the night sky like a funeral pyre.

Ten minutes later, we crawled out onto the muddy banks behind the old cannery, half-dead, hypothermic, and bleeding from a dozen wounds.

I checked my pocket.

The glass ampoule was whole.

I looked up at the sky, the cold rain washing the blood and soot from my face.