Chapter 2: The Ghost of Sector 4
Twelve years dissolved in a heartbeat. Marcus wasn't standing in a five-billion-dollar auditorium; he was back in the subterranean depths of the old Sector 4 prototype laboratory in Pittsburgh.
He smelled the chemical fire. He felt the suffocating heat of the lithium blaze that had turned the test facility into an incinerator. Back then, Marcus was merely an ambitious young engineer with brilliant blueprints and zero survival instinct. When the coolant manifolds blew, a steel beam pinned his leg. Smoke filled his lungs, blacking out the sun, sealing his fate.
Then came Arthur.
Arthur Campbell was forty-two, a third-shift maintenance worker with oil under his fingernails and pictures of his newborn son taped inside his hardhat. Arthur hadn't fled when the sirens wailed. Instead, Arthur grabbed a hydraulic spreader, sheared the steel pinning Marcus, and dragged him three hundred yards down the collapsing corridor.
At the blast shelter threshold, the automatic thermal doors malfunctioned. The manual override lever was outside the airlock.
"Get in, Marcus!" Arthur had roared through the blinding smoke.
"Arthur, no! We can both squeeze through!"
"If nobody holds the manual release pin, the vacuum seal won't latch! The heat will breach the glass!" Arthur had jammed the lever down, locking Marcus safely inside the reinforced vault.
Through the six-inch quartz window, Marcus had pounded on the glass, screaming until his throat bled. Arthur had looked at him, wiped blood and sweat from his soot-stained brow, pulled out a small black pocket notebook, and tapped his heart.
Then the fire swallowed him whole.
May you like
Marcus had walked out of that bunker alive, inheriting Arthur's life-debt. He built Vance Dynamics on the patent developed in that very lab. But he had buried the memory beneath billions of dollars, private jets, and endless corporate warfare.
---
