Chapter 31 #3
In my hand, I watched as the runes flickered across the obsidian face. Jade slashes and swooped lettering made new runes in the dice, glowing a bright green when the inscriptions had finished shifting.
“A new code,” I murmured. “I just wrote a new code. I’ve never done that before.”
“The laws of nature, of physics, of our biology are nothing more than a code, Nina,” Dupont murmured from across the room, clutching his arm to his chest where he had tried to stop me.
“You… just created something new. Something with the combination of the bloodlines. Perhaps…” His eyes went wide in wonder.
Dupont lunged, scalpel in his hand. My hand gripped hard around the dice, shoving him back with a burst of the essence energy that still rolled through my veins. I shoved a rush of air to the center of his chest, knocking him back a few feet.
He stumbled to stand again. “How?” He looked from me to the body, face crumbling in a pitiful reaction. “You,” he groaned. “You’ve stopped nothing, Nina. This work has been passed down for generations, and it will continue until he is awakened.”
The vessel was destroyed, nothing more than a sloughing mess on the surgery table.
As soon as a seed of guilt was planted in my heart, it was strangled by the roots of my reasons.
I could never bring Bernard back, but I could be the legacy he’d always wanted—and that started with putting an end to the worst thing he’d ever been involved with.
The chain had started with me, but now I was going to be the one to break it.
“I’ve stopped you, at least,” I told him.
His eyes rolled lazily in his head, looking at me then. “Who will believe you? You’re a wanted criminal. A Crown Killer. No one will listen to a word you say about me or any of this.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “But they’ll believe you.”
He blinked once. “What?”
I went to his desk and pulled the tape from the Scribe, still warm from recording, and threw it with the rest of the tapes, taking the entire suitcase with me. “Everyone looks forward to your morning announcements. Perhaps I’ll play them over the new speakers you installed through the Districts.”
This sparked something wrathful in his dark eyes, and the agony plaguing my body moments ago returned tenfold.
“I hate you,” he spat. “I hated your father. You have ruined my work, both of you, and I will not let you take my reputation with it.”
For the first time, Dupont turned his bloodline on me. Of course he had a bloodline. The most unnecessary, inessential bloodline tied to Vitalis. Instead of choosing something an engineer—a surgeon—could improve his patients’ lives with, he chose a bloodline to inflict hurt.
Pain.
I couldn’t breathe through this pain, couldn’t think logically. It dulled every sense until all I knew was the horror of his bloodline infiltrating so viscerally.
And then—it stopped.
There was a blur, a crack, the scent of iron tinging the foul stench in the air. Dupont’s gaze on me went unfocused, wide. He fell to the side in a heap of deadweight, groaning a long, last breath.
Max stood over me, a bloody hatchet in his hand.
“That was for your father,” he said quietly.
“Maxence.” I could barely breathe his name, my breath still broken in my chest. He pulled me off the floor, kicking Dupont’s body to the side with a sharp nudge, and wrapped me in arms of warm steel.
“Nina Veyr,” he whispered. “You are fucking brilliant. You might have just saved us all.”
“Everyone except my mother. The one person I came here for.”
“I heard,” he said. “But if she’s anything like you, then your mother is valuable, Nina. The Academy won’t kill her, that I’m sure of. This gives us time to reach her.”
Before I could protest, the machines attached to the vessel began to sound an alarm. Smoke churned from the bed, burning the remains to form a foul odor.
“We need to go,” I whispered. “Before this place blows.”
Max pulled me to my feet and started to usher me away, but I stopped him, turning back to retrieve the case full of his recordings. As soon as my hand touched the handle, the first machine burst. Shards of glass sprayed the surgery, smoke billowing from a crack in the wall.
“Nina, come on!” Another pull of my arm and we were out, running down the hall.
We made it to the stairwell as another explosion ripped through the ship, the hull groaning. Max wrapped an arm around my waist to take most of my weight as we ascended to the main deck.
“Here,” Max said, taking a key from his pocket. The handle was etched in runes that glowed a sublime green. “Pulled it off an enforcer.”
He used the key to unlock the coded doors, and we escaped the smoking hallway. The worst of the storm had passed, leaving behind a cold mist that coated the scaffolding climbing the funnels.
“Hold on,” Max ordered as we traversed the gangway and made it back to the docks. I held my breath, walking back across the bridge suspended over nothing. No ship below to catch us, just the bottom of the basin.
The moment our feet touched the docks, I collapsed, clutching the case to my chest while a violent explosion rocked the ocean liner.