Chapter 14 - The Unraveling
The server racks behind the black foam walls groaned with a terrifying, metallic screech as liquid nitrogen flooded the banks. Thick clouds of white, super-cooled condensation poured out from the ventilation grates, pooling like heavy fog across the basement floor.
Sarah carried Eleanor up the narrow concrete stairs, her lungs burning, her muscles screaming under the strain.
Behind her, Lin Wei—who had begun to stir as the anesthesia faded—was stumbling up the stairs on her own feet, guided by the survival instinct that had kept her alive through eighty-two years of hardship.
They burst out into the cold, frost-covered walk-in freezer, then through the swinging kitchen doors into the main dining room.
David Sun was gone.
The plastic zip-ties Sarah had bound his wrists with lay severed on the crimson carpet beside a sharp kitchen paring knife he had reached from a low shelf. The front door of The Golden Lotus stood wide open, cold rain blowing inside, soaking the worn pine laminate floor.
Sarah set her mother gently down in one of the wooden chairs near the window. She wrapped her own heavy rain jacket around Eleanor’s shoulders, holding her mother’s icy hands in her own.
Outside, the distant, rising wail of police sirens echoed through the rain-slicked streets of Bayview.
Sarah’s backup—the official patrol units she had dispatched before entering the alley—were finally closing in on the location.
Lin Wei shuffled over, sitting down quietly at the adjacent table. She looked at her trembling, age-spotted hands, then up at the front window where the rain washed over the glass in long, glittering streams. She reached out, taking a clean paper napkin from a dispenser, and wiped a smear of dry grease from her chin.
May you like
For the first time in three years, her eyes were entirely clear.
Arthur’s muffled screams echoed faintly from the basement below as the liquid nitrogen vapor spread through the lower level, freezing the dark-web console and locking him in the dark vault of his own creation.
