“Pistol work looks crisp, cousin. Though grey flannel really doesn’t hide how bad you sweat when you’re nervous,” Vashka said, stepping clear of the server pillar. The floor grating hummed under his boots, vibrating with the coolant churn of twelve thousand submerged processors.
Orenze didn’t flinch. The black barrel remained pressed beneath Lescara’s ear, dimpling her skin just above the collar of her tactical vest. “Still barking, little stray. You always were loud when the cellar rats cornered you.”
“The rats had better teeth,” Vashka replied. His hands hung loose near his hips, fingers hooked in his pockets, masking the tremor vibrating through his forearms. A countdown hovered on the vault’s perimeter screens in blinding amber numerals: 00:01:58. One minute, fifty-eight seconds before the Vrost legal code executed its final overwrite, cementing the forged lineage into the central registry forever.
“Look at you,” Orenze sneered, nudging Lescara forward an inch. She didn’t resist; her gaze met Vashka’s across the cold glass floor, steady, her jaw rigid. “Crawling through filth just to die in the basement where you belong. You actually believed my darling security chief bought your pathetic sob story? She brought you directly to my slaughterhouse.”
“She’s a woman of refined tastes,” Vashka drawled. “She likes my haircut. Unlike your tailor, who clearly hates your shoulders.”
Orenze barked a sharp, jagged laugh that echoed through the sub-level chill. “Quip while the clock runs, Kyrian. Because in ninety seconds, that name ceases to exist, and so do you. The Board is watching right now on channel zero. Twelve patriarchs in their penthouses, nodding along as I cleanse the final stain on the family ledger. They think you broke in to assassinate me. They think I am defending our grandfather’s legacy.”
From the shadow behind the central console, a thin, stooped man in an unbranded jumpsuit stepped into the halogen glare. He held a magnetic slate, tapping quietly. A thin technician. Lescara’s throat tightened, her pupils narrowing to pinpricks as she clocked the broker's gait, the tattoo of a severed crane visible beneath his collar.
“Archive feed is locked to the Board’s private frequency, Master Orenze,” the broker rasped, voice like dry husks grinding together. “Purge script armed. Biometric overwrite initiates at zero.”
“Good,” Orenze said, tilting his chin up toward the primary lens mounted in the ceiling. He addressed the camera directly, his tone dripping with condescension. “Did you hear that, uncles? Aunt Vostra? The great Rylin Vrost thought he could leave this conglomerate to a gutter brat raised on sour broth and stolen alms. He thought blood was sacred. But blood is just cheap ink until someone with the stomach to rule signs the decree. I paid that rat two million credits to wipe the old man’s registry forty minutes before his heart gave out. I swapped the hospital tags with my own bare palms while the nurses fetched cold water.”
He dug the gun barrel harder into Lescara’s temple, his eyes bright with venomous triumph. “The Board knows it. They’ll accept it because I generate returns, while you—you couldn’t even keep your own name from being deleted.”
00:00:43.
Vashka stopped smiling. The theatrical slouch dissolved from his spine. His posture flattened, squared, dangerous. The smirk vanished, leaving behind the hollow, feral gaze forged during ten freezing winters on stone temple flags.
“You really shouldn’t have bragged about the hospital tags,” Vashka said, his voice dropping into a flat, icy baritone.
Orenze frowned slightly, irritated by the lack of begging. “What does it matter? The Board won’t care about a dead patriarch’s final hour.”
“The Board doesn’t,” Vashka said quietly. “But Kravoc might.”
He raised his right hand, pointing not at Orenze, but up at the flashing transmitter node above the vault core.
“Did you check the route on that private frequency, Orenze? Lescara didn’t route it to the executive penthouses. She routed it to the district transit towers. The neon billboards in the low markets. Every civilian terminal from Sector One down to the canal sluices.”
Orenze’s face drained of color, his smug arrogance shattering like cheap glass. “What?”
“Channel zero isn’t encrypted,” Lescara whispered.
Before Orenze could process the words, Lescara struck. She dropped her weight instantly, driving her elbow back into Orenze’s solar plexus with sickening force. The breath blasted from his lungs in a wet gasp. The gun discharged, the slug ricocheting off the reinforced floor grating with an ear-splitting shriek of sheared metal.
Vashka lunged forward, closing the distance in three violent strides.
The technician scrambled to the auxiliary terminal to sever the broadcast, but Lescara was already on him. She seized the broker by his collar, smashing his face directly into the aluminum desk rim. Blood sprayed across the keypads. With ruthless precision, her left hand plunged into his jacket pocket, wrenching free a heavy obsidian flash-key marked with the crane insignia—the decryption ledger for her sister’s scrubbed record.
“Found you,” she breathed, throwing the broker to the deck and pinning his shoulder under her boot until bone cracked.
Across the vault, Orenze stumbled backward, clutching his bruised ribs, hacking for air. The countdown on the central monitors hit 00:00:00.
A deafening klaxon roared to life, accompanied by blinding crimson flashers. A synthesized voice boomed from every public speaker in the spire:
[BIOMETRIC OVERRIDE COMPLETE. TRUE SUCCESSION REVEALED.]
[BROADCAST ENGAGED: DISTRICT-WIDE DISCLOSURE.]
Above them, through the audio feeds tied to the city grid, the distant roar of thousands of people down in the streets echoed through the subterranean vents—the sound of an entire city watching the confession of their future tyrant broadcast sixty feet tall across every neon screen in Kravoc.
“You ruined me,” Orenze hissed, his mouth flecked with spit. The refined scion was gone, replaced by a snarling, cornered beast. His eyes darted to the shattered station, then to the overhead coolant main—a massive, frost-rimed conduit carrying liquid nitrogen under immense hydraulic pressure to keep the primary processors from igniting.
“You get nothing!” Orenze screamed.
He raised the fallen pistol with both hands and fired three consecutive rounds into the overhead valve coupling.
The metal ruptured with a deafening crack like thunder in an enclosed tomb. Super-chilled coolant blasted downward in a roaring, blinding white deluge, freezing the air instantly and engulfing the vault in an expanding hurricane of pressurized vapor.