Chapter 78 - The Truth in the Sluice Chamber
The interior of the submarine smelled of damp rust, battery acid, and thirty years of stagnant rot. Emergency orange light strips buzzed along the low, arched ceiling of the gantry tunnel.
Eleanor walked ahead of me, her boots clanging on the perforated deck plates. She held a heavy Colt .45 loosely at her side, not bothering to point it at me. She believed she had already won.
"You should have been grateful, Clara," she murmured as we descended a spiral iron staircase into the sub’s pressure hull. "We gave you discipline. We gave you resilience. Without the pressure we placed on you, you would have grown up soft, like the other girls in Oakton. You would have been useless for what comes next."
"You made me a slave in my own home," I said, my voice echoing off the curved pressure hull. "I ate stale bread while you bought Hannah imported silk. I paid the oil heat while my bedroom froze."
"And look at you now," Eleanor sneered, stopping before an airtight bulkheaded vault door. "You commanded a fleet through a hurricane. You dismantled Arthur's network in seventy-two hours. You are Vance through and through."
She spun the heavy locking wheel on the door. It hissed with escaping air, swinging open to reveal the sub’s command center.
Banks of analog dials, CRT green-phosphor monitors, and magnetic tape reels lined the walls, all glowing with an eerie, sickly light. In the center of the room, strapped into a hydraulic navigation chair, was my sister Hannah.
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She looked emaciated, her pale skin translucent, wires taped to her temples running into a bank of massive, vacuum-tube mainframes. But her eyes—those wide, childish eyes that had spent twenty years feigning helplessness—snapped open as I entered.
"Clara," Hannah whispered, a slow, predatory smile touching her bloodless lips. "You finally brought me my other half."
