Chapter 33
Chapter
Thirty-Three
JEX
The bottom of the chute isn’t a landing; it’s a collision.
I hit the pile of ancient, fossilised coal dust with a bone-jarring thud, the impact sending a plume of black soot into the air that tastes like a century of rot.
I barely have time to roll clear before Hallow comes sliding out of the darkness, a tangle of white skin and black coat, followed immediately by Ryker.
The air down here is different. It’s heavy, damp, and carries the low-frequency hum of the tide hitting the sea wall a few hundred yards away. This is the mansion’s secret plumbing—the tunnels where the “maintenance” was done so the neighbours didn’t have to hear the screams.
“Hallow!” I scramble over the coal, my hands finding her shoulders.
She’s shaking so hard her teeth are clicking together—a frantic, telegraphic sound. Her eyes are rolled back, showing only the whites, and her hands are clawing at the dirt, her fingernails already jagged and bleeding.
“She’s seizing,” Ryker gasps, shoving me aside to get to her. He doesn’t use a needle this time. He slams his palm against her chest, right over her heart. “Hallow! Stay with the pain! Don’t let the signal smooth it out! Feel the cold!”
I stand up, my rifle raised, my eyes darting to the shadows of the tunnel. We’re in a narrow, brick-lined artery that smells of salt and sewage. Above us, the mansion groans—a deep, structural shriek as the upper floors begin to pancake into the basement.
“Ryker, we don’t have time for a medical intervention!” I shout, the sound of the countdown still echoing in my skull like a phantom limb. “The whole fucking hill is about to go vertical!”
“I’m not treating her, I’m grounding her!” Ryker snarls. He grabs Hallow’s face and leans in, biting his own lip until it bleeds, then pressing his mouth to hers. It’s not a kiss. It’s a transfusion of reality.
Hallow’s back arches, a wet, guttural sound tearing from her throat, and then she snaps back. Her eyes focus, the blue returning with the force of a tidal wave. She gasps, a huge, racking lungful of soot and salt, and clings to Ryker’s tactical vest.
“She… she’s everywhere,” Hallow chokes out, her voice a shredded whisper. “She’s not just in the signal. She’s in the walls. Jex, the tunnels… they aren’t for coal. They’re for the pipes.”
“What pipes?” I ask, my skin crawling.
“The waste,” she says, her eyes wide with a new, fresh horror. “The things they cut out of us. They didn’t burn them. They kept them. Down here.”
I look down the length of the tunnel. In the dim glow of our tactical lights, I see them.
Thousands of glass jars, lined up on rusted iron shelves like a library of nightmares.
Suspended in yellowing formaldehyde are the pieces of the children Oakhaven outgrew.
Fingers. Eyes. Organs. Parts of us that were deemed ‘imperfect.’
This isn’t a tunnel. It’s a mass grave in a jar.
“Keep moving,” Ryker commands, his voice sounding hollow. He hauls Hallow up. “Don’t look at the shelves. Just look at the light.”
We run. The brick gives way to slick, moss-covered stone as we get closer to the sea wall. Behind us, the mansion finally exhales. A muffled thump ripples through the ground—not a sharp explosion, but the heavy, final collapse of a mountain. The countdown hit zero. The “purge” has begun.
The vibration sends hundreds of glass jars crashing to the floor. The sound is a cacophony of shattering glass and splashing liquid—the smell of a thousand deaths suddenly released into the air.
“There!” Ryker points to a heavy iron grate at the end of the tunnel. “The outlet. The fast-boats should be tethered to the pylon.”
We hit the grate, Jex and I throwing our shoulders against it until the rusted hinges scream and give way. We spill out onto a narrow concrete ledge, the black harbour water churning ten feet below.
The city of Oakhaven is a wall of fire behind us. But out on the water, silhouetted against the burning docks, three white tactical cutters are idling. They aren’t Choir boats. They’re sleek, silent, and flying the silver emblem of the Vance Corporation.
“They’re waiting for us,” Hallow whispers, standing at the edge of the ledge.
A spotlight from the nearest cutter snaps on, pinning us against the sea wall. A voice comes over a long-range acoustic device, so clear it feels like it’s inside our ears.
“The prototype is compromised,” a man’s voice says—flat, professional, the voice of a man who kills for a salary. “Authorised for retrieval of the primary asset. Eliminate the male siblings if they resist.”
I step in front of Hallow, my rifle levelled at the light. “Resist? I’m going to melt your fucking faces off.”
“Jex, wait,” Ryker says, his eyes fixed on the boat. He reaches into his vest and pulls out the leather folder. “They don’t want us dead. They want the ledger. They can’t scrub the data if we have the hard copies.”
“They don’t care about the data, Ryker,” Hallow says, her voice suddenly cold and distant again. She looks at the cutters, then at her own hands. “They want to see if the tracker works under fire.”
She turns to us, the orange light of the burning city making her look like a ghost made of embers.
“They’re not here to retrieve me,” she says, a terrifyingly calm smile spreading across her lips. “They’re here to see if you’ll kill each other to keep me.”
The spotlight is a physical weight, blinding and hot, turning the world into a stark white void where only the three of us exist. I can feel the salt spray hitting my face, mixing with the soot and the copper-tang of the blood I’m still wearing.
“Jex, don’t,” Ryker warns, his voice tight.
I don’t listen. I can’t. My finger is a twitch away from turning that spotlight into a shower of glass. Every instinct I have is screaming war.
“They’re baiting us,” I growl, my eyes fixed on the silhouette of the man behind the cutter’s rail. “They think we’re just another set of lab rats they can poke with a stick to see which one bites first.”
Hallow steps closer to the edge, her toes hanging over the lip of the concrete ledge. The wind off the harbour whips her hair into a frantic halo of black and red. She doesn’t look like she’s afraid of the fall. She looks like she’s considering the water as an escape—or a baptism.
“Jex, look at me,” she says.
I turn my head just enough to see her. The light from the cutter is washing her out, making her skin look like translucent porcelain. She’s smiling, but it’s the kind of smile you see on a person who’s already seen the end of the movie.
“The voice in my head… it’s not just humming anymore,” she whispers. “She’s giving me instructions. She’s telling me that if I jump, you’ll follow. And if you follow, they’ll have all three of us in the net before we hit the current.”
“I’m not letting them take you, Hallow,” I snap. “I’ll sink every one of those boats before they get a hand on you.”
“With what, Jex?” Ryker’s voice is a cold splash of reality.
He’s looking at the cutters, his mind already calculating the trajectories, the firepower, the impossibility.
“We have small arms and a half-empty magazine. They have high-frequency acoustic cannons and a reclamation team that doesn’t feel pain.
We aren’t winning a firefight on a ten-foot ledge. ”
“So what? We just give up? We hand her over?” I spin on him, the barrel of my rifle dipping dangerously. My chest is heaving, the adrenaline turning into a poisonous sludge in my veins. “I didn’t tear that ballroom apart just to watch her walk back into a cage.”
“Nobody is walking back,” Ryker says. He reaches into his tactical belt and pulls out a small, heavy cylinder—a thermite charge we pinched from the Choir’s armoury.
He looks at the leather folder in his other hand.
“We have the only thing she actually fears. The proof that her global ‘empire’ is built on the bones of her own children. If we burn the ledger, we burn her leverage.”
“She’ll kill us the second the first page catches fire,” I say.
“Maybe,” Ryker says, his eyes shifting to the cutters. “Or maybe she’ll realise that a dead prototype and a charred ledger is a net loss she can’t explain to her investors.”
Suddenly, the acoustic device on the boat let out a sharp, high-pitched chirp. The sound hit my eardrums like a physical blow, making my vision blur.
Hallow let out a strangled cry, her hands flying to her head. She lurched, her balance failing, her body tilting back toward the black water.
“Hallow!”
I lunge for her, my rifle clattering onto the concrete. My fingers caught the sleeve of the heavy black coat, the fabric straining as I hauled her back from the brink. She collapsed into my arms, her body rigid, her eyes rolling back into her head as a fresh seizure took hold.
“Retrieval initiated,” the voice from the boat boomed, no longer professional—it was mocking.
A second spotlight snapped on, this one focused on the pylon just a few feet from us. A heavy, magnetic tether shot out from the lead cutter, the metal cable hissing through the air before it slammed into the concrete with a bone-shattering crack.
They weren’t waiting for us to surrender. They were reeling us in.
“Ryker, the charge! Now!” I scream, pinning Hallow to my chest as the concrete under our feet began to vibrate with the pull of the winch.
Ryker doesn’t move. He’s staring at the lead cutter, his face a mask of pure, unadulterated shock.
“Ryker!”
“Jex,” he whispers, his voice failing. “Look at the deck.”
I look. Emerging from the cabin of the lead boat was a figure. Not a soldier. Not a doctor.
It was a girl.
She’s wearing a white lace dress—the exact same dress Hallow had been wearing in the portrait. She has the same hair, the same eyes, the same delicate frame. She’s stood at the rail, looking at us with a cold, terrifying curiosity.