Chapter 13: Awakening
The mercenary holding Maya’s right arm dropped like a stone, a bullet hole right between his eyes.
Everyone froze.
Marcus stood twenty feet away, his hands shaking violently, gripping a silver 9mm pistol he had pulled from his tuxedo jacket. The gun was smoking.
"Step away from her, Victor," Marcus stammered, tears streaming down his face. "I'm not... I'm not letting you hurt anyone else."
"Marcus," Thorne said slowly, his voice dripping with venom. "Put the gun down. You don't have the stomach for this."
"He might not, but I do!" Maya screamed. Taking advantage of the shock, she slammed her elbow into the groin of the second mercenary holding her. As the man doubled over in pain, Maya lunged for the console.
She didn't run away. She slammed her own hand onto the biometric scanner.
The console flashed a brilliant, blinding green.
DNA CONFIRMED. OVERRIDE ACCEPTED. INITIATING THAW SEQUENCE.
"No!" Thorne bellowed. "Stop her! She’s unlocking the pod without bypassing the security protocols!"
Maya didn't care. She started furiously typing on the keyboard, relying on her years of coding experience and her mother's flash drive, which she had already memorized.
The cryogenic pod hissed violently. Clouds of freezing white nitrogen poured out, obscuring the platform. Alarms began to blare, flashing blinding red strobe lights across the server room.
"Kill the boy!" Thorne ordered his remaining men.
Gunfire erupted. Marcus dove behind a server rack just as a hail of bullets shredded the spot where he had been standing. Sparks flew as the high-powered rounds tore through the servers, destroying millions of dollars of hardware.
Arthur, using the chaos, hooked his bound wrists over a sharp piece of shattered metal protruding from a server rack and began sawing frantically at his zip-ties.
Inside the freezing mist, the heavy glass door of the pod slid open with a hydraulic hiss.
Maya ran toward the platform, coughing through the cold fog. "Mom? Mom!"
A figure stumbled out of the pod, collapsing to her knees. Maya caught her. Evelyn Vance was freezing to the touch, coughing up a clear, viscous fluid. She looked disoriented, fragile, and utterly terrified.
"Maya?" Evelyn whispered, her voice raspy from twenty years of silence. She looked at her daughter’s face, tears welling in her eyes. "You're... you're so beautiful. You grew up."
"I'm here, Mom," Maya cried, hugging her tight. "I'm right here."
"The code..." Evelyn gasped, gripping Maya’s arm with surprising strength. "Maya, Thorne cannot get the Genesis algorithm. If he extracts it, he will destroy the world. You have to purge the system."
"I can't!" Maya yelled over the sound of gunfire. "I locked him out, but he has your master ledger! He can physically extract the drives!"
May you like
Evelyn looked at the massive server towers around them. She forced herself to stand, leaning heavily on Maya. A fierce, brilliant light burned in her eyes—the eyes of a genius who was done being a victim.
"Then we burn it to the ground," Evelyn said.
