The red strobe lights of the sub-level were a rhythmic heartbeat, mocking the frantic pulsing in my own chest. Every five seconds, a deep, synthesized voice announced the countdown: "FIFTY SECONDS TO SITE PURGE. REMOVE ALL BIOLOGICAL ASSETS."
"Move, Tobi! Breathe!" I begged, my fingers digging into his cold, wet shoulders.
My brother let out a sharp, jagged gasp. His eyes didn't open, but his chest finally heaved, sucking in the antiseptic air of the lab. He was alive, but he was dead weight. I looked at the exit—a heavy titanium door that was currently sliding shut as part of the lockdown protocol.
"Amara, the door!" Zane yelled.
He wasn't running for me. He was running for the server rack, frantically trying to pull a master hard drive from the wall. Even as the building prepared to swallow us whole, Zane Alexander was still trying to save his investment.
"Leave it, Zane!" I screamed, hauling Tobi's arm over my neck. "The Director is wiping the nodes! There's nothing left to save but your life!"
Zane looked at the drive, then at me. For a split second, the mask of the cold billionaire cracked. He saw the fire in my eyes—the "Weaver" who had just dismantled his grand design. He slammed his fist against the server and sprinted toward us just as the titanium door reached the halfway point.
"Give him to me!" Zane commanded, reaching out his massive arms.
I hesitated. Every instinct told me to pull Tobi away from him. But I was five-foot-six and barely a hundred and twenty pounds. I couldn't carry a grown man up four flights of stairs in forty seconds.
"If you drop him, I'll kill you myself," I hissed.
Zane didn't argue. He scooped Tobi up in a fireman's carry, his muscles straining against the silk of his ruined tuxedo. We dove through the narrowing gap of the door just as it hissed shut, the metal grinding against the heel of my shoe.
The stairwell was a chimney of smoke. The "Purge" wasn't just an explosion; it was an incendiary wipe. The Director was pumping thermite into the ventilation shafts to melt every piece of evidence.
"The elevators are dead!" Zane shouted over the roar of the fire. "We have to take the maintenance shaft!"
"My 'Designer' brain... I remember the floorplan!" I yelled, pointing toward a small, rusted hatch behind a stack of crates. "It leads to the textile showroom! It's the only part of the building with reinforced firewalls!"
We scrambled up the narrow iron ladder. Zane went first, carrying Tobi with a strength that was terrifying. I followed, my hands slipping on the rungs, my lungs screaming from the heat. Every level we climbed, the floor beneath us groaned as the thermite began to liquefy the structural steel.
"TWENTY SECONDS TO TOTAL SECTOR COLLAPSE."
We burst through the hatch into the Alexander Showroom. It was a world of ghosts—hundreds of mannequins dressed in my "Amara Lagos" collection, their silk faces staring at us in the dim emergency light.
Zane collapsed on the floor, sliding Tobi onto a pile of velvet rolls. He was gasping for air, his face covered in soot and blood.
"The... the drive," Zane wheezed, clutching a small, glowing chip he'd managed to snatch at the last second. "I have the... backup of the Silk Code."
"Is that all you care about?" I demanded, kneeling beside Tobi, checking his pulse. "The code? Your money? Your building is burning, Zane!"
"This building is my money!" Zane roared, standing up, his eyes wild. "Without this node, I'm nothing but a man with a bank account the Director can delete with one keystroke! I need you to finish the weave! If you link to this chip, we can override the purge from here!"
I looked at the chip, then at the Great Loom standing in the center of the showroom—the one Zane had moved here to show off to investors. It was an antique, but it had been modified with the same silver filaments as the lab.
"If I link to that," I said, my voice cold, "I become an Echo. Just like Tobi. You aren't saving us. You're just trying to reboot the cage."
"TEN SECONDS."
The floor beneath us buckled. A massive fissure opened in the center of the showroom, swallowing a dozen mannequins into the fiery pit below.
"Amara, do it!" Zane pleaded, holding out the chip. "It's the only way to stop the explosion! If the purge hits the main gas line, this entire block in Lagos vanishes!"
I looked at Tobi. His eyes were fluttering now. He looked at me, his lips moving silently. "Don't... let... him... win."
I took the chip from Zane's hand.
I didn't plug it into the Loom.
I looked at the massive industrial weaving shears sitting on the designer's table. I grabbed them and slammed the heavy metal blades down onto the chip, shattering the "Master Key" into a thousand pieces of useless silicon.
"NO!" Zane screamed, lunging for me.
"The pattern is broken, Zane!" I yelled.
I didn't wait for his reaction. I grabbed the fire-suppression lever on the wall—the one that activated the Halon gas and the emergency water shield.
The room was instantly flooded with a thick, white mist. The temperature dropped forty degrees in a second.
The explosion hit.
It wasn't a bang. It was a roar that felt like the earth itself was screaming. The floor vanished. The walls disintegrated. But the reinforced firewall of the showroom held for one heartbeat longer than the rest of the building.
I wrapped my body around Tobi, pulling a heavy, fireproof silk shroud over both of us.
"Hold on!" I screamed into the white noise.
The world went vertical. We weren't standing anymore; we were falling through a cloud of silk, ash, and shattered glass.