The spiral staircase of the lighthouse led down into darkness, its iron treads creaking under the combined weight of Lena and Ryan. Tom's screams could be heard from the flooded bookstore behind them—Matthew was probably broken, but he was putting up a fight like a rabid thing.
Ryan's flashlight beam skittered across the curved walls of the lighthouse, illuminating hidden annotations by James Bennett scratched into the brickwork:
*If you are reading this, Charles has activated the system.
The antidote requires three components:
Blood from a Calloway (the antigen)
Concrete mix of the marina's original construction (the binder)
A marrow of Bennett (the catalyst)*
Lena's stomach rolled. "Your father wrote this knowing you might need to—"
"Carve it out of my own leg?" Ryan's mirth was grim. He pressed his palm against an almost invisible seam in the wall. "Luckily, Dad was a literal bastard." The bricks slid back, revealing a glass vial of powdered bone labeled J.B. Backup Supply.
Lena's grandmother knew. She had concealed the marina's original concrete samples behind a false panel in the cellar of the bookstore. And Tom was currently bleeding out downstairs...
It all fit in a shamefully elegant way.
Another round of components were loaded into the old foghorn system, retrofitted as a distillation chamber. While the gears groaned into their old-age awakenings, Lena laid her forehead to the icy window of the observation deck. Below, the town streets shimmered with tainted floodwater. Hundreds of unconscious bodies floated in the plaza of the marina, where the sedative had already begun its visitation.
And then she saw it.
A single light blazing on the otherwise dark campus of Calloway Biotech.
Sophie's last text unfurled in her mind: Going dark to hit their offshore servers.
Except, that light was not from the server room.
It was from the maternity ward.
(Cliffhanger: The distillation machine beeps, its display flashing INSUFFICIENT CALLOWAY BLOOD SAMPLE as Lena's first contraction hits.)