Chapter 100 The Sky Cage

Chapter 100 The Sky Cage
Marcus

The wind from the helicopter blades whipped down through the broken glass roof, freezing the sweat on my face. Up there, dangling in the dark sky, was Maya. She was just a kid, maybe ten years old, strapped into that awful chair like a piece of factory equipment. Every time the purple cables behind her head flashed, her small body jumped in pain.

They never stop, I thought, a bitter taste rising in my throat. They kill my father, they break my brother, and now they use an innocent little girl from the slums.

"Marcus, don't look at her!" Jax shouted over the roar of the engine, his hand gripping my shoulder to steady me. "It's a trap. If you climb up there, she'll take both of you!"

"I don't have a choice, Jax," I said, my voice shaking. I looked back at Julian’s cold, empty metal shell on the floor. I had already lost him. I couldn't watch another person die because of my family's cursed bloodline.

Up on top of the black cage, the seventh Grand Marshal Vane looked down at me, her red coat snapping wildly in the wind. She lifted the metal rod, pressing it closer to Maya’s neck.

"Ten seconds, Marcus!" Vane's voice boomed through the helicopter's loudspeakers. "The satellite is moving into position. Walk into the light, or the girl's brain melts!"

"Marcus, no!" Sarah cried out, holding Lily tight against her chest. Her eyes were wide with fear. "We can find another way! We can shoot the chopper down!"

"If the chopper falls, Maya dies anyway," I said. I looked at Sarah, trying to print her face into my mind one last time. If I didn't survive this, I wanted her to know that I didn't regret fighting beside her. "Take Lily and get out of the sector. Take Julian's core if you can. Don't let them have anything else."

Before she could grab me, I stepped out into the center of the ruined lobby, right into the bright white searchlight beaming down from the helicopter.

"I'm coming up!" I yelled, raising my bleeding hands. "Let the girl go!"

Sarah

"Marcus! Come back!" I screamed, but the wind tore my voice away.

I tried to run after him, but my broken ribs flared up with a fierce, blinding pain that brought me straight to my knees. I gasped for air, clenching my teeth as tears blurred my vision. Jax caught me by the arm, his face pale and grim.

"Sarah, we can't stop him," Jax muttered, his eyes tracking a heavy steel cable that was lowering from the black cage. "But we aren't leaving him either."

"What are you doing?" I asked, wiping the dust and tears from my eyes.

Jax didn't answer. He turned to a small maintenance panel on the side of the concrete pillar. He smashed the plastic cover with his bare fist, exposing the heavy manual controls for the mall's ceiling cranes. "This place used to be a shipping hub before they turned it into a mall. The heavy cargo hooks are still up there."

"You're going to snag the chopper?"

"I'm going to pull it out of the sky if I have to," Jax growled, his fingers moving frantically over the old buttons. "Get Lily into the security car. If this roof collapses, you need to be ready to drive."

I looked up. Marcus had already grabbed the cable. The winch was reeling him up fast, lifting his small body away from the marble floor, straight toward the mouth of the beast.

Marcus

The climb was a blur of freezing wind and blinding light. My fingers burned as I clung to the vibrating steel wire. When I finally reached the bottom of the cage, the metal bars were ice-cold against my palms.

I scrambled through the open hatch at the base, collapsing onto the grid floor right in front of Maya's chair.

"Maya", I breathed, reaching out to touch her hand.

The little girl's head rolled slowly toward me. Her skin was deathly pale, and the purple light in her eyes was so bright it looked like it was burning through her eyelids. "Marcus..." she whispered, her tiny voice barely audible over the wind. "Run. She... she didn't slot the drive here. It's already inside me."

My blood ran cold. The drive isn't in the controller. It's a bio-chip inside the kid.

Before I could process the horror, a heavy boot slammed into my shoulder, throwing me flat against the iron bars. I gasped as Grand Marshall Vane stepped down into the cage from the roof, her silver hair whipping around her scarred face.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Vane said, a wild, ecstatic look in her pale eyes. She didn't look like a proper military commander anymore. She looked like a demon. "Your father thought he was so clever hiding the code in an instrument. But the human mind is the best storage drive ever built. And now, Nephew, you are going to be the power source."

She grabbed a thick, double-pronged cable dangling from the ceiling of the cage. The tips were humming with a violent, white-hot electrical current.

"Connect to her, Marcus," Vane snarled, lunging at me with the live wires. "Or I'll use the maximum voltage and turn her into a vegetable right now!"

I didn't back away this time. The absolute hatred for this woman exploded inside me. I didn't wait for her to touch me. I lunged forward, grabbing her wrists with both hands. The white-hot current from the cables jumped straight into my arms, locking up my muscles in a screaming wave of agony, but I didn't let go.

The blue data lines on my skin didn't just light up, they turned a deep, blood-red colour.

"If we burn," I roared into her face, the skin on my arms starting to smoke, "we burn together!"

Suddenly, a massive, metallic jolt shook the entire cage. Down below, Jax had activated the cargo crane. A massive iron hook shot sideways through the glass roof, snagging the helicopter’s landing gear with a terrifying screech of tearing metal.

The chopper violently tilted to the side, its blades clipping the concrete edge of the roof in a shower of massive orange sparks. The cage snapped sideways, throwing Vane and me against the bars.

But as we hit the steele, the black door of the helicopter cabin above us opened. A man in a pristine white suit stepped out onto the skids, completely unbothered by the spinning, crashing wreckage.

It was Silas. He wasn't dead from the carrier ship crash. Half of his face was covered in a sleek, gold mask, and he was holding a sniper rifle aimed right at Vane's head.

"The Board sends its regards, Director," Silas said through the speaker.

Silas is alive, and he's working for the board again! With the helicopter crashing and a sniper rifle aimed at the cage, who will survive the final plunge?