Her Step-Aunt Dragged Nine-Year-Old Emma by the Hair Demanding, “Where Did She Hide It?”—Then Emma Whispered One Sentence About Her Dead Mother That Made Her Father Look at the Necklace Around Her Neck.

Before Mercer could register the girl's movement, Evelyn slammed her thumb onto the red detonator switch.

*BOOM!*

The northern server rack exploded into a blinding vortex of three-thousand-degree thermite fire. The deafening concussion shattered the fluorescent bulbs overhead, plunging the subterranean bunker into an inferno of orange flames, screaming metal, and choking white smoke.

"KILL THEM!" Mercer roared, stumbling backward as the shockwave threw him against the elevator gate.

The mercenaries opened fire blindly into the smoke, their submachine guns barking in rhythmic, synchronized bursts: *RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT!* Concrete chipped off the pillars in lethal sprays of shrapnel.

Daniel didn't run backward. He lunged forward through the smoke, pulling the suppressed pistol from his jacket.

He fired twice through the haze. The lead mercenary collapsed with a muffled cry, clutching his neck. Daniel scooped Emma into his left arm, using the burning server rack as a shield against the hail of incoming lead.

"Evelyn!" Daniel shouted over the roar of the fire.

"RUN!" Evelyn screamed from behind a steel workbench, firing a compact submachine gun into the elevator vestibule with practiced, terrifying precision. "Take the service duct behind Server 4! It leads to the sewer main under Greenwich Street! GO!"

A burst of gunfire tore through the wooden workbench. Evelyn gasped, three dark red blossoms blooming across her chest. She collapsed against the control console, her hand smearing bloody fingerprints across the master override switch.

"Evelyn!" Emma screamed.

"Go, Daniel!" Evelyn coughed, blood spilling over her lips as she jammed her thumb down onto the secondary countdown timer. "Ten seconds! The entire foundation goes!"

Daniel gritted his teeth, tears of fury burning his eyes, and sprinted for the heavy iron hatch behind the blazing server racks. He wrenched the wheel lock open, shoved Emma through the circular opening into the dark, damp conduit, and dived in behind her just as the timer hit zero.

*CRACK-BOOM!*

The main structural charges detonated with the force of an earthquake. The reinforced ceiling of the bunker collapsed into the inferno, burying the servers, the lab, and Evelyn Cross beneath fifty tons of pulverized concrete and molten steel. The backdraft of heat slammed through the duct, tossing Daniel and Emma forward into the pitch-black rushing water of the municipal sewer line.

They crashed into the knee-deep, freezing runoff, coughing violently as smoke poured from the ruptured duct behind them.

Daniel hauled Emma to her feet, holding her against his chest as the icy water rushed around his thighs. His shotgun was gone; his ribs felt as though they were grinding together with every step. But in his coat pocket, wrapped in Evelyn’s clean microfiber cloth, lay the optical disc and the silver locket containing Claire’s master peptide culture.

"Dad..." Emma whimpered, shivering violently in the dark. "Are they dead?"

Daniel looked back toward the smoking, collapsed pipe. Above the rushing roar of the sewer water, he heard the faint, terrifying sound of heavy boots splashing into the runoff fifty yards downstream.

A voice echoed through the concrete tunnels, amplified and distorted into the hiss of a demon:

*"You have three minutes of air down here, Daniel! I know every exit along the Hudson River! Bring me the girl... or I will bury you both alive beneath this city!"*