Chapter Sixteen: Blood, Nerve, and Burn (Uncensored)

The severed fiber-optic cable whipped through the air like a dying, venomous snake, spitting blinding, blue-white arcs of sizzling electrical death across the frozen deck.

"The sync is completely gone!" Lena shrieked, her voice cracking with raw, unfiltered terror as she lunged across the slick ice, her bloody fingers clawing frantically at the skidding tablet. "If we don't re-bridge the main line in thirty seconds, the orbital relay drops offline permanently! We’ll be ghost data floating in a vacuum while they purge our hard drives!"

00:39:45.

Thirty-nine fucking minutes. The digital clock mocked them in harsh, bleeding crimson numbers.

Across the roof, the western turret whined, its heavy barrels shifting and realigning with terrifying mechanical hunger, zeroing back in on their exposed position. There was no cover left. The coolant housing was Swiss cheese, leaking toxic, superheated coolant that hissed and violently bubbled against the ice.

Adrian didn't hesitate for a fraction of a second. He charged the turret head-on, roaring like a cornered, feral beast, throwing his massive body directly into the line of fire to draw its lethal attention away from the women.

RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT!

Armor-piercing rounds slammed into the deck inches from Adrian’s boots, kicking up blinding, lethal shards of concrete. He lunged forward, catching the vibrating barrel of the tracking turret in his bare, calloused hands, his thick muscles bulging, straining, and tearing under the unimaginable weight as he forced the heavy steel barrel upward, screaming as the escaping heat blistered and blackened his skin.

"Sera! Freeze the goddamn core!" Adrian bellowed, his face dark with engorged veins, blood vessels popping in his eyes.

Sera didn't waste a breath. She sprinted across the open ice, sliding on her knees right into the shadow of the raging machine, and slammed both palms flat against its humming, smoking housing.

"Burn in hell, you piece of shit," she hissed.

A massive, violent surge of absolute zero energy flooded the turret's internal core. Frost shot up the steel casing in jagged, branching, lethal veins. With a sharp, metallic CRACK, the internal mechanisms froze solid, the barrels locking mid-stride before the entire machine shattered into a heaving heap of smoking, frozen scrap metal.

Adrian collapsed hard to one knee, breathing heavily, dark blood leaking from a shrapnel graze along his shoulder. He looked up through the stinging wind, locking eyes with Mari. "Get it done!"

Mari spun back to Lena, who was holding the frayed, sparking ends of the severed data cable. The heavy plastic coating was melted clean away, exposing the raw, humming, high-voltage copper wires inside.

"The ports don't match anymore!" Lena cried, hot tears freezing instantly on her blood-streaked cheeks. "The blast sheared the damn interface! We have to splice it manually—skin to raw skin!"

Mari looked down at her own hands. Her palms were a mangled, weeping mess of raw meat, shredded muscle, and torn skin, the exposed nerve endings screaming in fiery, unbearable agony. To touch live, high-voltage data current with open wounds was pure, unadulterated self-immolation. It would cook her nerves down to the bone and char her flesh to carbon.

"Give it to me," Mari said. Her voice wasn't shaking. It was terrifyingly, dead calm.

"Mari, no! You'll fry your hands to ash—you'll never hold a weapon again!" Lena screamed, grabbing her arm.

"We don't have a fucking choice!" Mari snapped, snatching the two loose ends of the cable from Lena's grip.

She didn't hesitate. She jammed the raw, sparking, screaming copper wires directly into the weeping, blood-soaked flesh of her torn palms, pressing them brutally hard against her exposed nerves to complete the circuit.

A blinding white flash of pure, unadulterated electrical agony tore through Mari’s body. Her back arched violently, a choked, blood-curdling scream of pure torment ripping from her throat as the massive high-voltage data stream surged straight through her central nervous system, cooking her tissue, liquefying her blood, and flooding her brain with blinding white-hot fire.

"Mari!" Adrian roared, scrambling desperately across the ice toward her.

"Don't fucking touch her—you'll break the circuit and kill us both!" Lena screamed, her own bloody fingers flying across her tablet as lines of aggressive green code violently cascaded down the screen. "It's working! The upload is taking the human relay! Seventy percent... eighty percent—"

Mari’s vision blurred into a nauseating sea of screaming red and blinding white. Her muscles locked tight in agonizing spasms that racked her frame, the sickening, unmistakable stench of burning human flesh filling the freezing air. She could feel her own blood boiling against the live copper, but she locked her teeth together so hard she fractured a molar, tasting copper and salt, forcing her mangled hands to stay clamped shut. Hold the line. Hold the fucking line.

"Ninety percent... ninety-five... ONE HUNDRED!" Lena shrieked, slamming her palm onto the enter key.

A deafening, low-frequency hum vibrated violently through the entire structure beneath their boots, shaking the very foundations of the tower. Above them, the massive, needle-like orbital transmission tower erupted into a brilliant, blinding column of pure blue light, stabbing straight up into the stormy purple sky, tearing through the heavy clouds and beaming the stolen, radioactive data straight into the stars.

The red security lights across the facility flickered, stuttered, and finally died, plunging the rooftop into sudden, profound, deafening silence.

00:00:00.

Done.

Mari's fingers finally spasmed open, and the smoking, dead cables dropped from her ruined, charred hands as she pitched forward into the ice.

Adrian caught her before she hit the deck, scooping her up into his massive, trembling arms and pulling her flush against his chest. He looked down at her smoking, ruined hands, his jaw clenched so tight a muscle ticked violently in his cheek, his dark eyes burning with a fierce, desperate, raw intensity.

"I've got you," he whispered against her hair, pressing her close as the storm above them finally began to tear apart, leaving them alive in the freezing dark.