Chapter 103 The Last Stand

Chapter 103 The Last Stand
The woman in white stood there, holding the remote like a trophy. Her eyes were hard and cold. Behind her, the soldiers held their guns steady, their fingers resting on the triggers. One wrong move, and thousands of innocent people would disappear into nothing.

My breath hitched. I felt the weight of all those lives pressing down on my chest. I looked at the pods, each one a home, a memory, a story that was still waiting to be lived.

"Don't do it," I said. My voice was steady, even though my hands were shaking.

"You think you’ve won, Eara?" the woman sneered. She didn't look like a scientist anymore; she looked like a gambler who had finally played her last card. "You broke the loop, sure. You beat the machine. But you forgot one thing. The company doesn't care about the machine. They only care about the result. And the result is that you are a danger to our business."

"People aren't business," I yelled.

"To them, they are," Kael whispered beside me. He didn't look at the soldiers. He looked at me, his eyes full of a strange kind of sadness. "Eara, if you step into that portal, the bomb goes off anyway. She’s not here to negotiate. She’s here to make sure we don't leave."

"Then what do we do?" I asked.

Zero stepped forward. Her knife was held tight in her hand. "We fight. We don't have a choice."

The woman in white tapped a button on her remote. The ground beneath us groaned. Sparks flew from the base of the pods. "You have five seconds to walk into the portal and leave your friends behind," she said. "Or I start the countdown."

My mind raced. If I left, Kael and Zero would die, and those people would be gone. If I stayed, we would probably all die anyway. But there was one thing she didn't know. I wasn't just Eara anymore. I was a part of the network. I could feel the energy humming in the floorboards. I could feel the secret connections that held this facility together.

"Five," the woman counted.

I looked at Kael. "Trust me?"

"With my life," he said.

"Zero, jump!" I shouted.

I didn't run for the portal. I didn't run for the soldiers. I threw myself flat on the floor and slammed my palms into the ground. I didn't need a computer. I didn't need a key. I just needed to be loud.

I shouted into the network. I screamed for every bit of power that was left in the dying building.

"Four!"

The lights in the room went crazy. They strobed, blinding the soldiers for a split second. A blast of electricity shot out from the floor, knocking the soldiers off their feet.

"Three!"

The woman stumbled, her thumb slipping on the remote. I scrambled across the floor, my fingers brushing the cold metal of her boot. I yanked hard, and she fell backward, the remote skittering across the floor toward the hole in the air, the portal.

"Two!"

I dove for the remote. I didn't care about the portal. I didn't care about leaving. I just wanted that remote away from her.

My fingers touched the plastic. It was warm. I grabbed it, flipped around, and looked at the woman. She was crawling toward me, her face a mask of pure hate.

"One!" she screamed.

I didn't press the button to stop the bomb. I pressed the button that opened the exit vents to the air outside.

The pressure in the room changed instantly. A massive gust of wind pulled everything toward the ceiling. The soldiers, the woman, and the debris were all sucked up toward the vent.

"Kael! Zero! Grab on!" I yelled.

I wrapped my arms around a heavy steel pipe bolted to the wall. Kael grabbed my leg, and Zero grabbed his. We hung there, dangling over the floor while the room turned into a tornado of flying metal and broken glass.

The woman in white screamed as she was pulled up, her remote spinning away into the dark, churning air of the vent.

"It’s over!" I shouted over the wind.

The facility began to tear itself apart. The pods were lifted gently by the shifting air currents, moving slowly toward the open vent, not crashing, but rising. They were being pulled out into the real world.

The woman was gone. The soldiers were gone. It was just us, hanging on to the pipe, watching the pods rise like bubbles in water.

Then, the roof shattered completely. We were looking up at the sky.

I looked at the remote that had fallen near my hand. It wasn't just a remote. It was a key to the entire grid. I picked it up. My hands were bloody, and I was exhausted, but I felt a strange sense of calm.

"We did it," Zero whispered.

I looked down at the room. It was empty. But then, I saw something that made my blood run cold.

A shadow moved in the corner.

It wasn't a soldier. It was a tall, thin man in a suit I had seen a hundred times. He was standing near the portal, watching us. He wasn't scared. He wasn't running.

He was holding a tablet, and he was smiling.

"Very good, Eara," he said. His voice echoed through the entire cavern. "You saved them. You moved them. You did exactly what we wanted you to do."

I froze. "What do you mean?"

He tapped his tablet. "This facility was just a test run. We needed to see if you would try to save them. We needed to see if your 'humanity' would make you move the population to a more secure location."

He pointed to the sky. The ships were gone. In their place, a giant, golden dome was closing over the entire city, trapping everyone inside.

"You didn't break the cage," he laughed. "You just helped us finish building it."

He stepped toward us, his hand reaching out. "Now, shall we begin the next game?"