Director Vance didn't scream. Fanatics rarely do when their idols come to break their teeth.
She just stared down the twin barrels of Echo’s smoking street-sweeper, her eyes glittering with a terrifying, unholy reverence.
"Kill me," Vance whispered, a bloody smile spreading across her lips. "It changes nothing. The harvest is already complete."
"I hate monologues," Echo said, and pulled the trigger.
BOOM.
The glass booth exploded outward in a shower of red and chrome. Vance’s body hit the metal grating with a dull thud.
"Well," Kyle called up from the lower platform, stepping over a mound of unconscious guards while wiping oil off his cheek. "That was dramatic. Can we go back to Paris now? I think I left my sanity in the arrondissement."
"Not yet," Lyra said, her nose twitching as she padded toward the far end of the catwalk. She pointed a blood-stained claw toward a massive set of titanium blast doors at the rear of the chamber. "The real stink is coming from in there."
I stepped through a quick spatial rift, landing silently beside Lyra. Echo dropped down a second later, racking another shell into her weapon with a heavy clack-clack.
Above the titanium doors, a digital counter hummed in low, green LED light:
EXTRACTION PROGRESS: 99%
"Extraction of what?" Kyle asked, trotting up behind us and plugging his wrist-deck directly into the door’s manual bypass. "Guys... this isn't a database. It's an atmospheric bio-transference protocol."
My sovereign aura flared violently, reacting to something on the other side of the wall. Not an enemy. Not a trap.
A pulse.
A slow, heavy, primordial heartbeat that vibrated straight through the soles of my combat boots.
"Kyle," I said, my voice dropping an octave. "Open it."
"Tiara, whatever's in there is throwing off energy readings that don't even conform to Euclidean math—"
"Open it."
Kyle swallowed hard and bypassed the secondary lock.
PNEUMATIC HISS.
The massive doors split down the center, grinding open against centuries of dust. Beyond lay a cavernous, subterranean vault lined with obsidian pillars. And suspended in the center of the room, held aloft by dozens of glowing stasis beams, was a single, towering sarcophagus made of black star-metal.
The lid had already been peeled back.
Inside lay the source of the heartbeat.
It wasn't a corpse. It was a weapon—a jagged, two-handed broadsword forged from absolute darkness, pulsing with a silver-and-crimson aura so dense it bent the light around it.
Echo took a step forward, her ruby eyes wide, tracking the energy flowing from the blade straight into the room's atmospheric vents. "That's... that's where our power comes from."
"The Prime's weapon," I murmured, stepping up to the edge of the dais. "They weren't just cloning our bodies. They were using the facility to siphon her dormant soul out of the blade and force-feeding it into us."
"And now the siphon is at ninety-nine percent," Kyle said, his voice dropping all trace of humor as he stared at his screen. "Tiara... it's not transferring the energy to you or Echo anymore."
I narrowed my eyes. "Then where is it going?"
Before Kyle could answer, the obsidian pillars around us ignited with burning crimson runes. The stasis beams shattered.
From the shadows behind the sarcophagus, a figure stepped into the light.
Silver hair. Black coat. The same man who had erased the Paris city block.
He held a slender glass phylactery in his hand, swirling with the final one percent of the Prime's condensed, silver soul-shard. He looked at me, then at Echo, his smile sharp enough to bleed on.
"It's going to me," he purred. "Thank you for opening the door, Seventeen."