"Get down!" Silas tackled Elara as the windows of the ballroom shattered.
But it wasn't a bomb. It was a gas canister.
White smoke flooded the room. Screams erupted as the elite of the underworld scrambled for the exits.
"Silas! I can't see!" Elara coughed, her hand slipping from his.
"Stay low! Use your thermal!"
Silas activated his contact lenses. The world turned into shades of orange and red. He saw Leo moving toward Tanaka. The boy wasn't a bomb; he was the extraction team.
Leo grabbed the Chimera vial and the Ares Key.
"Not today, kid," Silas roared, launching himself through the smoke.
He tackled Leo, but the boy moved with inhuman speed—enhanced by the neural link. They crashed through a set of double doors into the hotel's kitchen.
Elara followed, her gown torn, a kitchen knife in each hand.
"Leo! Stop!" she pleaded.
The boy turned, his face twitching. "Sister... save... me..." he gasped, his real voice flickering through the link. Then, his eyes went blank again. He raised a suppressed pistol.
"He's not in control, Elara!" Silas shouted, pinned behind a stainless-steel prep table. "I have to take the shot!"
"No! Don't hurt him!"
"If I don't, he kills us both and delivers that list to Ouroboros!"
Elara looked at the boy she had spent two years betraying her soul to save. Then she looked at Silas—the man who had come back from the dead for her.
She made her choice.
She threw the knife. It didn't hit Leo's heart. It hit the small, glowing blue light on his neck.
SPARK.
Leo collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.
Silas rushed forward, checking the boy's pulse. "He's alive. The link is severed."
He grabbed the Chimera vial from Leo's hand.
"We got it," Silas breathed.
But as he looked up, he saw the kitchen doors lock. A screen on the wall flickered to life.
It was Marcus. He was laughing.
"Did you really think it would be that easy, Silas? The vial you're holding... it's not the list. It's a binary trigger. And the second half of the chemical is currently being pumped into the hotel's ventilation system."
Silas looked at the vial. A red gas was beginning to swirl inside the crystal.
"You have sixty seconds to choose, Ghost," Marcus sneered. "The boy lives, or the girl lives. You can only give the antidote to one."
Silas looked at the single blue pill inside the vial's cap.
Elara looked at her brother, then at Silas.
"Give it to Leo," she said firmly.
"No," Silas said, his eyes burning with a terrible resolve. "There's a third option."
"Silas, what are you doing?"
He crushed the pill and split it in half.
"If we're going down," Silas said, pulling her into a final, desperate embrace as the red gas filled the kitchen, "we're going down together."