Chapter 52 Project Orphan; He Might Kill My Brother
Brea's POV
The emergency lights along the floor switched on but, all I could see was grey. Adrian walked through the door.
The suit Adrian wore was unlike anything I had seen. It rippled when he moved like the surface of water when something passes underneath it.
The emergency light hit him as a light that I couldn't figure out ran along the edges of his suit, barely there, more felt than seen.
"Ten minutes are up, Brea," he said. He walked into the room like he had been here before. Stepped over the debris from the explosion without glancing down at it.
"The Prince's lockdown is impressive," he said, looking around. He touched the wall.
"Lead-lined stone. Signal blockers in the foundations." A pause. "A good lock for its time. But not built for what we have now."
"What did you do to the Estate," I said.
"Sent a signal through the ventilation system. Targeted the biometric panel." He turned to look at me. "The building is fine, Brea. I didn't come here to destroy anything."
"Project Orphan," I said. I wanted to keep him talking.
He stopped walking. Something shifted in his face.
"Hmm." He tilted his head slightly. "How did you get access to that file?" A pause. The pleasant smile returned. "It's classified at the highest level we have." He looked at me with something that wasn't quite admiration but was close to it. "You must be very good."
"Brandon is the main subject," I said. "My brother. You've been running tests on him."
"How long?"
"From the beginning," he said. He walked closer. "Your brother carries a version of what you carry in your blood. Weaker...he doesn't have your ability, but useful for our research." He stopped a few feet away.
"Your father understood what you were before you did. The debt was a story we gave him to explain it to himself. He came to us, Brea. He handed you over because he was scared of what you were becoming."
He let that sit. "He thought he was keeping the family safe," he said. "In a way, he was. We only ever needed one of you."
The dust in the air was moving. I caught it at the edge of my vision small particles drifting upward instead of settling, arranging into shapes I couldn't name.
The shadows in the room were doing something similar. Not moving the way shadows move when the light source shifts.
Moving toward me instead.. Like the room itself was trying to cover me.
I wasn't doing it on purpose. The dagger in my hand pulsed.
"Aim for the shadow." Rayne's voice in my head. No explanation attached. Just the instruction.
Adrian kept talking. "The signal locked onto this building four minutes ago. The ten minutes I gave you weren't for you to leave. They were for the system to calibrate." He glanced up briefly like he could see through the ceiling.
"In about six minutes the first pulse fires. Every vampire within three hundred meters goes down. Your Prince. His squad. All of it."
I kept my eyes on the purple current running along the edges of his suit. My brain was already working through it the way it worked through any circuit problem.
Find the weakness, find what happens when you interrupt it. The suit ran off his body's signals. Which meant it needed a clean connection between him and the technology to function.
Disrupt that connection and the suit wouldn't just switch off the feedback would run back the wrong way. Into him instead of through him.
Like unplugging something while it's still running.
The shadows had reached the floor around my feet.
Adrian reached for my throat. I dropped downwards as I rolled across the wet floor, sliding on the damp from the rain we had tracked in. I came up on one knee.
The dagger came down into the floor at the darkest point of his shadow before I fully decided to do it.
The blade went through the floor and kept going.
Into the shadow itself the dark shape Adrian cast under the emergency lighting, the part of him that touched the ground before he did.
I felt the magic in my blood find the thread connecting the shadow to the man who cast it, and pull it taut, and pin it flat against the stone the way you pin a document to a board so it can't move.
I didn't understand the mechanics of what I was doing. My hands just did it and the rest of me caught up a second later.
The suit reacted instantly. The current exploded across the surface crackling lines of light running in every direction, the feedback loop I had broken sending a shock back through the connection into his body.
Adrian froze. Mid-step. One foot still in the air. Every muscle locked at once.
"What..."
"What did you?" His jaw was working but barely. His eyes the only part of him still moving freely found me..
For the first time since he walked through the door the pleasantness was completely gone.
"How are you?" A sharp intake of breath as the suit sparked harder along his left side. "Release this.". Desperate underneath the command.
"I said 'release' this.. do you have any idea what you've just" Another spark. A sound that was almost a scream caught behind locked teeth. "Brea."
He stood there. Perfectly rigid. A statue that sparked.
I stood up slowly. Looked at him. At the dagger still in the floor. At the shadow pinned beneath him. At the face of the man who had sold my brother's life for research data, still trying to give me orders with a locked jaw and sparking suit.
"Six minutes," I said. I turned back to the terminal.
I had work to do. The feedback from the suit tore through the room like a wave.
The lightning still crackling across Adrian's locked suit surged outward in one violent pulse, and every piece of electronics in the room responded to it at once.
The terminal was closest. The EMP hit it directly the screen went white, then black, the circuit board underneath letting out a sharp
crack and a shower of sparks that jumped across the desk surface.
The smell of burnt plastic and fried wiring filled the room
instantly. Every indicator light on the array flickered once and died. Thin smoke curled from the vents along the terminal's side.
Then the room's power cut entirely. No emergency lighting
Adrian still locked mid-stride, his suit continuing to discharge in the dark, throwing brief violent flashes of light across the walls like a dying signal.
I couldn't see the door. "Move!" Adrian's voice came through the smoke from somewhere to my left strained, compressed, still fighting the lock the dagger had put on him but not fully contained anymore.
"Find her! She's still in the room!" I dropped low where the smoke was thinnest.
Boots in the corridor. Flashlight beams cutting under the door. The squad was already outside. I pressed my palm flat against the floor.
"She can't have gone far," one of the squad members said outside. "Room's sealed."
"It was sealed," Adrian said. Still strained. "Find the breach."
I moved my palm against the floor, following the vibration..Further left. Along the wall through the smoke until my hand found fabric under my fingers.
"Check the walls," Adrian said. Closer now. "She knows this building better than she should."
I found the thin gap behind the wall hanging. A small hidden button. I pressed it. A panel swung open without a sound.
I slipped inside and pulled it shut just as flashlight beams cut under the door and the squad rushed in.
The passage was narrow and dark as my both shoulders touched stone.. I kept one hand on the wall and moved carefully, listening to the muffled sounds of the squad tearing apart the room on the other side.
"Nothing on thermal," someone said through the wall.
"The stone is blocking it," Adrian said. His voice was further away now. Still tight. "She knows about the passages. Someone told her." A pause. "Or she felt them."
I kept moving. "Rayne," I whispered. To the dark. To myself.
"Come on," I muttered, pushing off the wall. "Come on come on come on..."
The passage turned left. Then sharply right. The ceiling dropped and I had to duck and keep moving, one hand trailing the wall, following the gold thread in the stone that was the only navigation I had.
Then it hit me. Fully. The thing I had been holding at the edge of my mind since I opened that file.
"Primary subject. Project Orphan. Brandon."
"No," I breathed. "No, Rayne doesn't know.... he doesn't know who Brandon is.. he's going to kill him.."