Chapter 24 - The Descent into Sector Zero
Ethan didn't wait for Evelyn to finish her sentence.
He spun on his heel and launched himself back down the brick tunnel toward the mansion, running faster than he had ever run in his life.
"Thomas!" Ethan screamed into the darkness, his boots splashing through the spilled diesel fuel in the generator room. "Thomas, lock the door! Shoot anyone who approaches!"
He hit the service stairs three at a time, tearing his fingernails on the brick walls as he hurled himself upward toward the second floor.
Behind him, he could hear Evelyn running, her combat boots pounding the concrete, carrying Julian in her arms as she abandoned all pretense of escape to follow him back into the house.
Ethan burst onto the second floor.
The red emergency lights bathed the hallway in a blood-colored haze.
The heavy oak door of the nursery was wide open. Its brass deadbolt had been sheared in half by a silent hydraulic spreader.
On the parquet floor outside the doorway lay Thomas, sprawled on his side, blood pooling around his gray hair from a massive blow to the back of his skull. His revolver lay three feet away, untouched.
"Thomas!" Ethan dropped to his knees, checking the old man’s neck. A faint, rapid pulse fluttered beneath his fingers. Thomas was alive, but deeply unconscious.
Ethan grabbed the revolver from the floor, cocked the hammer, and stepped into the nursery.
The room was in shambles. The yellow curtains were torn from their rods. The blue birthday balloons had been popped, their deflated rubber skins littering the white rug like bruises.
The crib in the center of the room was empty.
Leo was gone.
On the small changing table lay a digital tablet, its screen glowing brightly against the dim room.
Ethan approached the table with his gun raised, his chest heaving with ragged, suffocating breaths.
The tablet was running a live video feed.
On the screen was the sterile, white-tiled interior of Sector Zero—the sub-basement vault Ethan had explored earlier that evening.
Standing in the center of the subterranean medical quarantine suite was Mrs. Gable, the gentle, grandmotherly nanny who had sung Leo to sleep every night for a year. But she was no longer wearing her floral cardigan. She wore a pristine white lab coat, her gray hair pulled back in a severe, clinical bun.
In her arms, she held baby Leo, who was crying silently, his little fists clutching his blue pajama top.
Standing behind Mrs. Gable was a man wearing a dark tailored suit, his back turned to the camera. On the stainless-steel desk beside them sat an open cryo-transport case, illuminated by a pale blue cryogenic vapor rising from its pressurized interior.
Beside the tablet on the changing table in the nursery, a speaker crackled to life.
A smooth, cultured voice spoke through the audio channel—a voice Ethan had not heard in five years.
"Good evening, Ethan," said the voice on the speaker.
The man on the video screen slowly turned around to face the camera.
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He had silver hair, sharp aristocratic features, and cold, calculating gray eyes.
It was Arthur Vance. Clara and Evelyn’s father. The man who had supposedly died of a heart attack six years ago.
