Chapter 110 The Prime Breach

Chapter 110 The Prime Breach
Marcus

The white glass mask of the gold commander reflected the blinding light pouring from my own skin. My body felt like a boiler room about to burst. The purple electricity I had sucked out of Mason’s fused chest was rattling my teeth, filling my veins with a wild, uncontrollable heat.

The prime sector, my mind panicked. We hadn't just beaten a corporate director. We had drawn the eyes of the real masters, the people who lived above the clouds and pulled every string in the city. And they didn't want the network drive; they wanted me.

"Do not move, asset", the gold commander's voice boomed through his mask speaker. It sounded empty of human feeling, colder than any machine. "Your bio-signature is now the property of the High Council."

"He's... mine!" Mason shrieked from the robot's chest plate.

Even with his power draining into my skin, his madness didn't slow down. He forced the machine's remaining good arm upward, aiming the smoking mini-gun straight at the line of white-armoured soldiers.

"Fire," the commander said flatly.

Twelve blinding blue laser beams shot through the smoke at the same time. The heat from the beams instantly turned the damp air into a wall of blistering steam. They hit Mason’s robot chassis, melting the heavy steel plates like hot butter.

Mason let out one final, agonizing scream as the laser fire cut through the black cables connecting his neck to the battery. The yellow light in the robot's eyes snapped to black, and the massive metal claw holding my waist opened up.

I hit the wet mud hard, gasping for air as Mason’s fused body tipped over backward, crashing down like a heap of worthless scrap metal. My uncle, the man who had destroyed my life for a corporate crown, was gone in a single second. But there was no time to feel the relief of revenge. The soldiers were already marching toward me, their magnetic boots clicking loudly on the wet stone.

Sarah

"Marcus! Get up!" I screamed, pulling Lily behind my back.

Jax was completely dead weight now, his eyes fluttering as he leant against the crumbling wall. The laser fire had turned the small stone chamber into a furnace. The white-armoured soldiers moved like ghosts through the steam, their long rifles tracking Marcus’s trembling body.

"Grab the child," the gold commander ordered, pointing his glowing finger toward Maya's still form on the dirt floor. "The biochip inside her neural tissue is a secondary property. Clear the rest of the room."

Clear the room. That meant killing us. To these people from the high towers, we weren't even citizens. We were just stray dogs living in the drainage pipes under their streets.

"No!" I roared, my fingers tightening around the heavy iron wrench.

I didn't care that they had laser rifles. I didn't care that my ribs were broken. I couldn't let them take Maya, and I couldn't let them drag Marcus away to some high-sector lab to hollow out his brain. I stepped out from the corner, my boots splashing through the oil-soaked mud, ready to swing at the first white helmet that got close.

"Sarah, stop!" Marcus shouted, his voice cracking with a terrifying volume.

He didn't crawl away from the soldiers. He stood up, his legs shaking violently as the stolen white energy pulsed under his skin. The gray lines on his arms were bulging, glowing so bright that I could see the outlines of his bones through his skin.

Marcus

The power inside me was a screaming demon. It wanted out. If I held it in for another ten seconds, my own heart would cook itself.

"You want my brain?" I glared at the gold commander, my vision turning completely white. "Come and take it!"

I slammed both of my hands down onto the wet concrete floor of the chamber.

I didn't aim a bolt at a single soldier. I threw the entire stolen battery charge of Mason's war machine directly into the underground power lines running beneath the drainage floor.

The reaction was instant and violent. The high-voltage lines exploded beneath our boots, ripping the stone floor completely apart. A massive wave of blue electricity and shattered concrete burst upward, throwing the line of white-armoured soldiers backward into the rubble. The gold commander stumbled, his white glass mask cracking down the centre as the pressure wave hit him.

The ceiling groaned dangerously. The heavy drainage pipe behind us, the one filled with rushing, dirty water, split completely open under the force of the blast.

A wall of black water, thick and heavy as a mountain slide, poured into the small chamber, instantly sweeping all of us off our feet.

"Sarah! Jax!" I choked out before the freezing water dragged me under.

The current was too strong. It spun me around in the dark, slamming my shoulders against the slimy brick walls of the deep pipe as it washed us down into the lower sewer lines of the slums. I lost my grip on everything. I couldn't see Sarah. I couldn't see Lily.

When my head finally popped above the rushing water, the current threw me out onto a dry concrete ledge deep inside the central grid of Sector Nine.

I dragged myself out of the stream, coughing up cold, dirty water. My skin was cold, the white light completely gone, leaving my body empty and broken. I looked down the dark tunnel.

Sarah was there, lying flat on her stomach a few feet away, her fingers still holding onto Lily's jacket. Jax was floating near the edge, his face white but his chest still moving.

But Maya was gone.

I scrambled on my knees through the dark mud, my heart dropping into a freezing pit of pure horror. In the middle of the ledge, right where the water had washed us up, stood a tall figure clad in black leather.

It wasn't a soldier. It was a woman with short, silver hair, and she was holding Maya’s small, dripping body in her arms. In her left hand, she held a heavy silver pistol aimed straight at my forehead.

"You did a good job breaking the network, Marcus," the woman said, her voice sounding exactly like the Grand Marshall we had destroyed in the mall. But her eyes weren't pale blue. They were a deep, natural green. "But the real Vane never puts all her eggs in one basket. Say goodbye to the slums."

The real Grand Marshall Vane has Maya, and she’s standing right in front of them! With Marcus completely drained and his friends unconscious, how will they survive her final execution?