Chapter 12: A Deal with the Devil
Victor Thorne snapped his fingers. Two of his mercenaries moved at lightning speed, slamming Arthur against the server racks and binding his wrists with heavy zip-ties. Arthur grunted but didn't struggle; he was calculating the odds, and right now, they were terrible.
Another mercenary grabbed Maya, forcing her to her knees beside Arthur.
"Don't hurt them!" Marcus panicked, dropping the ledger. "Victor, you said nobody was going to get hurt! You said we were just taking the company back from her!"
Thorne clicked his tongue, picking up the black ledger from the floor. He dusted it off gently. "Marcus, my boy. You are as painfully naive as your father is arrogant. I didn't come here for the company. I came for the code."
He flipped open the ledger. The pages were not filled with financial records; they were filled with complex, hand-written alphanumeric algorithms. The master decryption keys for Project Genesis.
"You see," Thorne began to pace, the tap of his cane echoing in the cavernous room, "twenty years ago, Evelyn realized that her genetic mapping AI was too dangerous. She locked me out of the mainframe. When I confronted her on the bridge, she threatened to destroy everything. So, I offered her a choice."
Maya’s eyes widened as the horrifying truth dawned on her. "You didn't push her. You blackmailed her."
"I gave her a heavily sedated alternative," Thorne corrected smoothly. "She agreed to go into stasis. In exchange, I promised to let her precious little daughter live a normal, oblivious life. A fair trade, wouldn't you say?"
"You psycho," Maya spat.
Thorne ignored her. He walked up to the central console connected to Evelyn’s cryogenic pod. He began typing furiously, inputting the decryption keys from the black ledger.
"For two decades, I’ve had her safely tucked away," Thorne continued. "Arthur built this beautiful tower right over my secret little bunker, completely unaware that his stolen empire was sitting on top of my prize. But the system was biometric. I needed Evelyn’s DNA to activate Phase Two of Genesis. And unfortunately, the stasis pod requires a two-factor authentication to thaw her out without triggering a lethal neuro-toxin failsafe."
He paused, turning his cold, dead eyes to Maya.
"I needed her biological offspring to bypass the final firewall," Thorne smiled. "Julian was supposed to bring me your blood. But when Eleanor’s little coup went sideways, she reached out to me from prison. She offered me the ledger in exchange for her freedom."
"Eleanor doesn't care about the code," Arthur said through gritted teeth. "She just wants to watch me burn."
"And burn you shall, Arthur," Thorne chuckled. He gestured to his mercenaries. "Bring the girl to the scanner. It’s time to wake Sleeping Beauty."
They hauled Maya to her feet and dragged her toward the console. A glowing biometric handprint scanner awaited her.
"Marcus!" Maya yelled, struggling against the heavy grip of the mercs. "If he gets this code, he can rewrite human genetics! He'll sell it to the highest bidder! You have to stop him!"
Marcus stood frozen, his world shattering for the second time in three days. He looked at his father, bound and bleeding. He looked at Thorne, the monster he had foolishly trusted.
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"Press her hand to the glass," Thorne ordered.
Before the mercenary could force Maya's hand down, a deafening gunshot rang out.
