The Trojan Horse

The woman in the glass cube didn't blink. She floated in a suspension of viscous blue fluid, her hair fanning out like a halo of dark ink, tubes snaking from her spine into the machinery above.

"Mom?" I whispered again, the word scraping against the raw lining of my throat.

She looked exactly as I remembered her from the funeral I hadn't been allowed to attend. Smooth skin, high cheekbones, the small crescent scar above her left eyebrow. But she wasn't dead. She was preserved. A butterfly pinned to a board.

"It's a stasis tank," Felix said, his voice trembling as he walked around the perimeter of the cube. "Look at the readouts. Heart rate is four beats a minute. Body temp is near zero. She's in cryo-suspension."

"She's the CPU," Chloe said. She wasn't looking at my mother. She was looking at the cables running from the tank into the floor. "They're using her brain to process the encryption. That's why the system is biological. It's her."

I felt bile rise in my throat. Lucius hadn't just killed my parents. He had harvested them.

"Get her out," I ordered, my hands gripping the cold glass. "Felix, open it."

"I can't just pop the latch, Aria," Felix said, typing frantically on his datapad. "She's integrated. If I sever the connection without the command sequence, the shock will kill her instantly."

"Then find the sequence."

"I'm trying! But the architecture... it's alien. It's rewriting itself every few seconds."

"Move," Chloe shoved Felix aside. "I'll do it. I don't care if she wakes up, I just want the source code."

I raised my gun, aiming it at Chloe's head. "You touch a single wire, and I end you."

Chloe froze. She looked at me, a smirk touching her bruised lips. "Sentimental. That's why you'll lose."

"Felix," I said, not lowering the weapon. "Is there a manual override?"

"Maybe," Felix said. "There's a maintenance node in the sub-server room. Behind the main bank. But it'll be shielded."

"I'll handle the shields," I said. "You keep *her* away from the tank."

I backed away, keeping my eyes on Chloe until I reached the shadows of the server racks. The hum of the machines was deafening here, a physical pressure against my eardrums.

I moved deeper into the labyrinth of blinking lights and cooling fans. The air was freezing, designed to keep the hardware from melting down. I found the maintenance door Felix had mentioned. It was unmarked, barely visible in the gloom.

I swiped the black card the Broker had given me.

*Access Denied.*

I swiped it again. Red light. The Broker's pass had expired, or Lucius had locked down the core from beyond the grave.

I didn't have time for finesse. I raised my gun to shoot out the lock mechanism.

A hand clamped over my mouth.

It was hard, calloused, and smelled of antiseptic and gunpowder. An arm wrapped around my waist, dragging me backward into a narrow gap between two server towers.

I struggled, driving my elbow back, but he anticipated the move. He spun me around and slammed me against the metal casing of a server, pinning my wrists.

"Quiet," a voice hissed in my ear. "Or we both die."

I went rigid. I knew that voice. I knew the weight of that body, even though it was leaner now, trembling with exhaustion.

Dante.

He looked terrible. He was wearing a stolen security uniform that was too big for him, stained dark with fresh blood at the shoulder. His skin was grey, sweat-sheened, his eyes burning with a feverish intensity.

"You're supposed to be in an ambulance," I whispered, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs.

"I walked away," he rasped, wincing as he shifted his weight. "Did you really think I'd let you come down here alone?"

"I'm not alone. I have Felix. And Chloe."

"Chloe is a mercenary," Dante spat. "And Felix is out of his depth. Look at the tank, Aria. Really look at it."

"It's my mother."

"It's a trap," Dante said. "That woman... she's not the processor. She's the bait."

He pulled a small tablet from his vest. It showed a schematic of the Vault. Red lines pulsed underneath the floor of the cavern.

"The entire room is rigged," he said. "Pressure plates. Biometric sensors. The moment you open that tank, the moment you break the seal... the coolant floods the chamber. It flash-freezes everything within a hundred yards."

I stared at him. "Why?"

"Because Lucius knew you'd come," Dante said. "He knew you couldn't resist saving her. It’s the ultimate failsafe. If he dies, he takes the heir with him."

"Then how do we stop it?"

"We don't," Dante said. "We can't save her, Aria. She's been dead since 1999. That thing in the tank... it's just a shell keeping the system online."

"You're lying."

"I wish I was," he said softly. He released my wrists, but he didn't step back. He stayed close, his forehead resting against mine. "I came back to stop you from killing yourself. We have to leave. Now."

"I can't leave her."

"You have to," he said. "Because there's something else you need to know. Something the Broker didn't tell you."

He tapped the screen of his tablet. A file opened. It was a birth certificate. Old, yellowed.

*Name: Aria Vane.*
*Father: Lucius Vane.*
*Mother: Vivian Blackwood.*

I stared at the document. The Broker had said my mother was Lucius's sister. That was incestuous, twisted. But this...

"Lucius isn't your uncle," Dante whispered. "He's your father."

The world spun. The hum of the servers turned into a roar.

"And the woman in the tank?" I asked, my voice breaking.

"She isn't your mother," Dante said. "She's his wife. The one who tried to run away with you when you were a baby."

He gripped my shoulders.

"We have to go, Aria. Before Chloe figures out how to open that tank and kills us all."

I looked at him. I wanted to believe him. I wanted to trust the man who had taken a bullet for me.

But trust was a currency I had run out of.

"Show me," I said. "Show me the proof."

Dante nodded. He tapped a command into the tablet.

The lights in the cavern shifted. The blue glow of the tank faded, replaced by a harsh, red emergency light.

And in the glass, the face of the woman changed. It flickered. A hologram.

The tank was empty.

"See?" Dante whispered.

But as the hologram faded, revealing the empty fluid, a voice boomed over the intercom.

"Step away from the heir, Dante," Chloe's voice echoed, amplified and distorted.

I looked out through the gap in the servers.

Chloe was standing on the bridge. She wasn't looking at the tank.

She was looking at us.

And she was holding a detonator.