Chapter 18 - The Sister We Never Named
My hands moved before my brain could process the terror. I stepped in front of the vintage biometric panel, pulling the protective casing away to expose the old circuitry.
"The secondary key," I muttered under my breath, remembering the sequence my father made me recite every night before bed when I was seven years old. *Seven, four, alpha, nine, echo, tango.*
I punched the six-digit sequence into the keypad. The mechanical tumblers groaned, gears shifting behind the three-inch steel plate, but the lock didn't release. The screen flashed amber: **BIOMETRIC VERIFICATION REQUIRED.**
"It's Marcus Vance's scanner!" I shouted over the blaring siren. "It needs his thumbprint! He's been dead for twenty years!"
"No, Sarah!" Clara screamed through the glass, rising to her feet despite the zip-ties. "Marcus didn't use his print! Look at the scanner glass! He calibrated the sensor to your DNA line! Use your own thumb!"
The automated voice droned overhead: *“Lockdown in thirty seconds.”*
I pressed my right thumb firmly against the glass prism. A green laser line swept across my skin twice. A sharp mechanical chime sounded, followed by the heavy clunk of hydraulic bolts retracting.
Dante threw his entire weight against the heavy vault door, wrenching it open. He rushed inside, slicing Clara’s bindings with his combat knife and pulling her into his arms. Clara clung to him for three agonizing seconds, burying her face into his neck, before pulling back and grabbing both of our hands.
"We have to run!" Clara yelled. "Croft set incendiary charges in the main boiler! The entire foundation is going to collapse!"
We bolted out of the vault, sprinting across the smelting floor as small secondary explosions began ripping through the electrical junction boxes along the walls. Smoke billowed from the ceiling, thick with toxic burning rubber.
We reached the cat-walk leading toward the emergency river exit when the main boiler detonated behind us with a thunderous roar. The shockwave threw us forward onto the iron grating. Metal beams warped and screamed, showering us in sparks and falling masonry.
Dante was on his feet in an instant, hauling Clara up with one arm and grabbing my tactical vest with the other. He shoved us through the heavy metal fire door into the exterior drainage alley just as the roof of the smelting room collapsed inward in a blinding inferno of orange fire and twisted steel.
We collapsed onto the wet gravel of the riverbank, gasping for air as the cold rain beat down upon us. Behind us, the Blackwood Ironworks burned against the gray sky, a towering pyre of iron and smoke.
Clara knelt on the muddy bank, coughing violently, her trembling hands reaching out to touch my face. Her fingers brushed against the scar near my temple, tears streaming down her soot-stained cheeks.
"You look just like your mother," Clara whispered, her voice choking with twenty years of grief and relief. "I'm so sorry, Sarah. I'm so sorry we couldn't find you sooner."
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"You're alive," I said, my vision blurring as I gripped her hands tightly. "That's all that matters. Sophia is waiting for you."
Dante stood over us, his weapon drawn, his eyes scanning the tree line as he pulled out his encrypted satellite phone to summon our extraction team. But when he looked down at the screen, his face drained of all color.
