Chapter 6 - THE RED ENGINE
The digital clock on the wall blinked relentlessly in the gloom: 02:45... 02:44... 02:43...
The electronic hum echoing from beneath the floorboards was rising in pitch, accompanied by a faint smell of burning ozone and vaporized gasoline. The incendiary charges were warming up—thermite devices designed to burn at four thousand degrees Fahrenheit, capable of melting steel beams and turning human remains to fine ash in seconds.
"Eleanor!" Sophia scrambled up from the chair, her legs shaking from sedation, grabbing Eleanor’s arm. "The door is reinforced! We can't break it!"
"The windows are barred with iron grates," Eleanor said, her mind working at hyper-speed. Her corporate panic had vanished; her risk-assessment brain was running simulations at maximum capacity. Three minutes. Fire from below. Wooden structure over brackish water.
"Leo!" Eleanor turned to the boy. "The brooch! Give it to me!"
Leo reached into his sweater pocket, pulling out the silver feather and slapping it into Eleanor’s palm.
Eleanor unpinned her own brooch from her lapel. She held both pieces under the white beam of her flashlight. The two silver feathers were asymmetrical—one curved left, one curved right. When brought together, the bottom stems locked into a precise, mechanical dovetail joint.
CLICK.
The two teardrop rubies pressed against each other. A tiny, blue micro-LED built into the stem of her brooch lit up. The hardware key was active.
"What good does the key do us if we're burned alive?!" Sophia screamed over the rising whine of the charges.
"The boathouse isn't just a shed, Sophia," Eleanor said, her eyes sweeping the room, stopping at the wooden skiff resting on cinder blocks in the center of the floor. "Dad didn't just store boats here. Remember thirty years ago? What was under the floorboards near the winch?"
Sophia froze, her clouded eyes widening as a thirty-year-old memory resurfaced. "The sub-deck... the bait well..."
01:30... 01:29... 01:28...
"Help me move the boat!" Eleanor yelled.
She and Sophia threw their weight against the wooden hull of the skiff, shoving it off the cinder blocks. It crashed sideways onto the floorboards with a deafening racket. Beneath where the boat had rested was a square iron hatch built directly into the floor—a heavy, rust-encrusted access port used decades ago to lower live bait nets directly into the sea inlet below the boathouse.
Eleanor grabbed the rusted iron handle of the hatch. It was frozen solid with decades of salt corrosion.
"It won't budge!" Eleanor grunted, pulling with all her strength, her suit jacket tearing at the shoulder seam.
00:45... 00:44... 00:43...
The floorboards near the front entrance suddenly erupted in a blinding, white-hot flash of thermite fire! Smoke hissed into the room, carrying a heat so intense it singed Eleanor’s hair from twenty feet away.
"Leo! The skiff's oar!" Eleanor screamed.
The boy snatched a heavy ash-wood oar from the fallen boat and shoved the flat blade into the gap beneath the rusted hatch handle.
"Together!" Eleanor roared.
Eleanor, Sophia, and Leo all grabbed the shaft of the wooden oar, using it as a lever. They leaned back with their combined weight.
CRACK-SNAP!
The rusted iron latch sheared off! The heavy metal hatch swung open, revealing the black, churning waters of the ocean inlet eight feet below the floorboards. Rain lashed up through the opening, cold and sharp.
00:15... 00:14... 00:13...
The roof rafters caught fire, raining drops of molten tar down on them!
"Jump! Leo, jump first!" Eleanor commanded, grabbing her nephew by his sweater and dropping him down through the hatch!
A splash echoed from below. "I'm okay!" Leo's voice called up through the roar of the water.
"Go, Sophia!" Eleanor shoved her sister through the opening.
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Sophia dropped into the dark water just as a massive wall of fire swept across the boathouse floor!
Eleanor grabbed the connected silver brooches, tucked them deep into her inner breast pocket, and leaped down through the open hatch into the freezing black Atlantic just as the structure above her erupted into a towering inferno of white-hot destruction.
