The steel doors hissed shut, severing the last visible connection to the outside. The Panic Core wasn’t merely reinforced; it was an insulated void, a coffin of polished chromesteel and low-frequency humming. Jaskya felt the deep thrum of the pneumatic pistons echo in her bones. Tarkis was out there. Bleeding. Dying, perhaps.
“Mama, Papa hurt,” Orik whispered, his small fingers clenching her jacket. His wide, dark eyes reflected the sterile glow of the Core’s internal lighting, a stark contrast to the chaos they’d just escaped.
Nemi, pale on her modified gurney, coughed, a wet, rattling sound in the sudden silence. “He’s not dead yet. The Core’s bioscans show his vitals still… struggling.” She pointed a weak hand at a small diagnostic panel built into the wall. A blinking red icon confirmed Tarkis’s proximity, a desperate beacon.
Jaskya’s vision blurred. The adrenaline that had propelled her through the last hour was rapidly draining, leaving behind a leaden exhaustion. Her mind raced, a frantic hamster on a wheel. The failsafe. Her own creation. A concrete tomb triggered by the very attack Tarkis was now fighting. He had saved them, sacrificed himself, for a trap she had set.
“Nemi,” Jaskya’s voice was hoarse, “that stim. The one you salvaged from the old hospice med-bay. The one that was supposed to… accelerate cognitive recall.”
Nemi’s eyes, usually so sharp, were clouded with pain. “The experimental synthetics? Jaskya, it could fry your neural pathways. Total amnesia is the *best* outcome. Paralysis, seizure, neuro-degeneration are all documented risks. The memories were erased for a reason.”
“A reason I need to remember *now*.” Jaskya pushed Orik gently behind her, away from the gurney. “He’s out there, Nemi. Tarkis. Protecting us from my own creation. We don’t have time for hesitation. Give it to me.”
With a sigh that seemed to deflate her frail frame, Nemi reached beneath her worn blanket. Her hands, thin and brittle, fumbled with a small, unlabelled auto-injector. The needle, barely visible, gleamed. “It’s a blind shot. No way to gauge dosage or reaction. You might not remember a thing, or you might never wake up.”
Jaskya snatched it. The cold, smooth plastic felt alien in her hand. She ripped open her sleeve, exposing the pale skin of her inner forearm. “I designed this place. I built its doom. There has to be an abort code, a back door, something I hid from myself.” Her gaze met Nemi’s, resolute. “If I don’t try, we all die. Tarkis, too.”
She pressed the injector against her arm. A sharp hiss, a momentary sting. Then, nothing. Just the deep hum of the Core, the distant thud of explosions barely audible through the thick walls. Her head spun. Bile rose sharp in her throat. The sterile light seemed to pulse, growing brighter, then dimming to an oppressive gloom.
Then, fragments. Colors. A child’s laugh, hollow and echoing. A cold, metallic taste in her mouth. The oppressive scent of industrial solvent. A cavernous, white-walled laboratory, not the Apex. Her younger self, frantic, hunched over a holoscreen, the image of a DNA strand twisting and mutating. Panic. Deep, chilling panic.
*“They’ll use him. As a weapon. A physical key to unlock the population’s defenses.”*
The words were her own, but distant, like a voice underwater. She saw herself then, her face gaunt, eyes bloodshot. A dark figure, formless but menacing, loomed in the periphery of the memory. Telepathic interrogators. She’d heard whispers of such corporate assets, psychic tools used to extract secrets, to pry open minds.
*“The abort code. I have to hide it. Even from myself. They can’t find it. Not in my mind. The erasure… it’s the only way.”*
The vision intensified. The DNA strand on the screen wasn't just any genetic sequence; it was Orik’s. Modified. Weaponized. The syndicate rivals, not just seeking corporate dominance, but pathogen warfare, using her son as the carrier. The Apex wasn’t just a tomb for Tarkis; it was a containment field, a kill zone for the weaponized strain. Her past self had built a prison, a lethal trap, to protect Orik from being turned into a living conduit.
Then, a searing pain behind her eyes, the edges of the memory fraying, pulling her back to the sterile confines of the Core. She gasped, clutching her head, the truth a bitter, sharp taste on her tongue.
“Mama? You okay?” Orik’s voice, concerned, cut through the fading echoes. He was already at the diagnostic panel, both hands dancing across the embedded interface. “The firewalls are… really old.”
Nemi watched Jaskya with wide, frightened eyes. “You remembered, didn’t you? What was it? What was so terrible?”
Jaskya pushed herself upright, the nausea still churning in her gut. “They wanted Orik. To turn him into a biological weapon. A living vector. The Apex was a quarantine… a kill zone for them, if they ever got close.” She looked at her son, whose small face was illuminated by the flickering data streams on the panel. “The failsafe… it wasn’t just for Tarkis. It was for *all* of them. To prevent the weapon from ever leaving this place.”
“Found it!” Orik exclaimed, oblivious to the horrific revelation. The diagnostic panel twitched, then shifted to display a live external feed. Static-laced images of the Apex’s outer perimeter. Mercenaries, heavily armed, swarmed the lower levels, moving with a chilling efficiency. They were no longer just engaging Tarkis. They were preparing for the Core itself.
One camera angle showed a group of soldiers attaching glowing, cylindrical devices to the reinforced blast doors leading to the Core. The thermal readout on the screen identified them instantly: thermite charges. They weren’t trying to breach the doors; they were trying to melt them shut, to turn the Core into an oven.
“They’re going to burn us out,” Nemi breathed, her voice a thin thread.
“No,” Jaskya said, her voice surprisingly steady, the pieces of her erased past clicking into place. “They’re going to burn us *in*. They’ll melt the doors, seal us in, and then the structural failsafe will still trigger. We’ll be buried alive, slowly incinerated.” She stared at the thermite charges, then at the flickering red icon of Tarkis’s vitals. He was still fighting, still alive. But for how long?
“Orik, can you get me the Apex’s full schematic? Everything. Including the original structural integrity reports.”
Orik tapped swiftly, his brow furrowed in concentration. The screen fractured into a dozen data windows, holographic projections of steel girders, concrete foundations, and the intricate web of smart-systems. He highlighted a specific section, a towering, half-finished glass spire that rose from the heart of the mansion.
“This is the main structural control nexus, Mama,” Orik announced, pointing to a small, isolated chamber at the very top of the spire. “All the foundation’s primary regulators route through here. But it says… danger. Unstable.”
Jaskya’s gaze locked onto the image of the spire, a skeletal finger reaching for the smog-choked sky. Unstable. Half-built. But it was the only way. The abort code, the manual override for the foundation collapse, lay hidden within that precarious, glass-walled pinnacle. To save Tarkis, to save her son and sister, she had to go there.