Chapter 77 - The Architect of Cape Sorrow
I stood on the wet deck of the *Harvester*, looking at the woman who had criticized my every haircut, counted every slice of bread I ate, and demanded my paycheck the morning it cleared.
"Hannah isn't at the house, is she?" I asked, my voice deadly level.
"Hannah is in the central control room of this sub," Eleanor answered, gesturing toward the open steel hatch. "Waiting for her sister. She needs the second key, Clara. The capsule inside your ribcage is only the receiver. Hannah carries the deciphering matrix inside her skull. That was her 'illness.' The chronic migraines. The seizures. The neural implants Harold bought from the defected German researchers in ninety-two."
The pieces fell into an image of monstrous clarity.
We were not sisters. We were two halves of an analog computer, bred and engineered by two sociopaths who traded forty years of family life for the ultimate blackmail weapon against the global banking cartel.
"Caleb," I said quietly, without turning around.
"I'm here, Clara," he whispered behind me, his service pistol steady.
"If I go down into that hatch, don't follow me. If the sub starts to submerge, you fire the dredge's high-pressure deck cannons into the ballast vents. Seal them open. Don't let her dive."
"I’m not letting you go down there alone," Caleb said, his jaw set.
May you like
"You have to," I said, looking back at him, seeing the honest warmth in his eyes—the only honest thing I had encountered since the night I walked out of my parents' house. "Because if I don't balance this ledger, none of us will ever be free."
I grabbed the mooring line, swung across the narrow gap of churning foam, and landed hard on the slick steel deck of the *USS Sovereign*.
