Read Chapter 30: A Coin for a Bandage

The governor arm of the mainframe still had power. Individual wall sconces flickered, casting weak, jaundiced light over the crumpled body of the guard. Tom groaned, a wet, rattling sound that Marcus didn’t like. He’d pulled the copper lever, and the network had screamed its death through the stone, but a secondary power source routed through a junction box above the black slab kept the machine’s heart in a twilight state—and its failsafes twitching.

Smoke curled from a panel beneath the dead operator’s station. Automatic systems were rewriting the volatile memory, folding into a compression algorithm that would scrub every physical byte before the power died. If that finished, the data wasn’t just gone; it was obliterated. No forensic recovery. No proof of what Arnaud and his people had done.

Marcus pressed a torn piece of his sleeve against Tom’s head wound. The bleeding hadn’t stopped, just slowed to a dark, sluggish pulse. Tom’s eyes fluttered. “Father…” he whispered.

“He’s gone, Tom. You saw it.” Marcus hated the flatness in his own voice. He’d watched the operator—Tom’s long-dead father—dissolve into white static when the lever was thrown. A consciousness stored in copper and silica, erased by his own hand. There was no time to grieve it.

A sharp electrical crack from the junction box made Marcus flinch. A thin arc of blue light bridged two severed wires, their copper ends writhing like dying eels. The loose one snapped against the casing, sparking. As it touched the inner chassis, the mainframe’s fans spun up—a low, hungry whine. The scrub was accelerating.

Marcus scanned the floor. Tools, scattered. A broken lantern. The dead guard’s revolver, still warm. No wire cutters. He pawed through the debris, fingers closing on something cold and heavy. He pulled it out.

The wolf coin.

Bronze, worn by centuries of palms. Tom had pressed it into his hand that first night in London, calling it his lucky piece, his inheritance from a father who’d vanished when he was a boy. A five-pointed star etched on one side, a wolf’s head on the other. Marcus had carried it out of habit. Now it felt like accusation.

He looked at the severed wires. One connected to the positive rail, sparking against the chassis. The other dangled, stripped and loose. If he could bridge them, restore enough current to bypass the failsafe, he could trigger a manual overload. Blow the machine to slag. But metal on a live circuit meant a dead man holding it. Unless…

Marcus shoved the coin’s edge into the gap between the two wires. The bronze bit through the arc, and the current hesitated, finding the new path. The copper ends smoldered against the wolf’s muzzle. A thin wisp of smoke, acrid and chemical. Then the wire took the connection, and the hum dropped to a lower, denser tone.

“Tom,” Marcus said, hauling the younger man to his feet. Tom’s weight sagged against him, boots scraping. “We have to move. Now.”

“Did you do it?” Tom’s voice was a cracked whisper.

“I made it angry.” Marcus dragged him toward the tunnel mouth where Sophie had disappeared. But the mainframe’s console was blinking faster now, its lights strobing red. Not scrubbing anymore. Overloading. The current was building through the coin, through the junction box, through every cable that fed the black slab. The stone hummed.

Marcus looked back. Tom was stumbling, one hand pressed to his head, blood threading through his fingers. “Marcus—the box. You left the coin in there. It’ll fry everything.”

“Good. That’s the point.”

“No. Listen.” Tom grabbed his arm. Sweat and blood streaked his face, and his eyes were too wide. “The failsafe isn’t just data loss. It’s a shaped charge. They rigged the mainframe to detonate if tampered with. That’s why Arnaud’s men didn’t use it as a shield. If you overload it, the whole chamber comes down. Including us.”

Marcus’s stomach dropped. He looked at the junction box. The coin was already glowing dull orange, the bronze warping. The wires had fused to it. The detonation, when it came, would vaporize the console and take a good section of the catacombs with it.

“Then we don’t stand here,” Marcus said.

He shoved Tom forward, into the tunnel mouth. Behind them, the red strobe quickened. The hum rose into a whine. Marcus counted steps, strides, the weight of Tom against his shoulder. The tunnel curved, and the light from the chamber began to dim behind them.

“Faster,” Tom slurred.

“I’m going as fast as your blood loss allows,” Marcus snapped.

They reached a junction of three tunnels. Marcus didn’t know which one Sophie had taken. There was no sign—no scuff, no thread snagged on stone. He chose the widest, heading toward the faint sound of dripping water and, beyond it, nothing. The whine behind them peaked into a scream.

The blast shoved them off their feet.

Hot air cannonballed down the tunnel, carrying grit and stone chips. Marcus hit the ground, Tom landing half on top of him, the breath driven out of both. The world shook, a grinding, tectonic roar that went on longer than any explosion should. Dust filled the tunnel, stinging, blinding. Rotten-egg sulphur mixed with scorched copper and bronze.

For a long moment, the only sound was the patter of settling debris. Marcus spat grit. His ears rang, a high, piercing note that drowned everything else. He pushed Tom off him, shaking his shoulder.

No response. Tom’s body was limp, face turned away. Blood pooled darkly beneath his head, spreading on the stone.

Marcus rolled him over. Tom’s eyes were open but unfocused, pupils unequal. The head wound had reopened, a deep gash above the temple, and the blood was flowing too freely now. Marcus pressed his torn sleeve against it again, hard, feeling the skull shift beneath his palm. That wasn’t a surface wound. That was a fracture.

“Stay with me,” Marcus muttered, but Tom didn’t answer.

When the ringing subsided, Marcus heard something else. Footsteps. A lot of them. Shouted orders in French, echoing through the tunnels, growing closer. True Guardians converging on the blast site.

And Tom was slipping away.

Marcus scooped him up, arms hooked under Tom’s knees and shoulders, the wound still bleeding onto his chest. Tom’s head lolled. His lips moved once, forming a word Marcus couldn’t hear. Then his eyes went blank, and his breathing shallowed to a ragged whisper.

The footsteps came closer. Marcus turned away from them and ran into the dark.

He made it thirty paces before the tunnel split again, and he had to choose: left, toward the sound of water, or right, toward the footsteps? Neither led out. Neither was certain. Marcus tightened his grip on Tom and picked left, because the water meant pipes, and pipes meant a way up.

Behind him, the blast chamber was already silent. The mainframe was gone. The wolf coin was somewhere in that rubble, melted to slag. And Tom’s father was gone for good, his consciousness lost in the same fire that should have killed them both.