Chapter 16 - The Voice Wearing Mine
My own voice came through the warehouse speakers.
“Thank you for bringing the entire Morgan family into one secure location.”
For half a second, even the gas seemed to stop moving.
Then Ryan whispered, “That isn’t you.”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”
The woman on the file had my face because Gray Lantern had spent years building it from stolen medical scans, voice samples, service photographs, and personnel records. But a face was not a life. Whoever she was, she had never sat beside Mom during one of Dad’s memorial services. She had never carried Ryan home after he split his chin at fourteen. She had never learned how silence changed when someone in the room had decided to kill.
I listened to the speaker.
Her breathing was too even.
She believed the gas had already won.
Dad tore open the back of my identity packet and found a thin plastic card taped beneath the lining.
“Maintenance override,” he said.
Cross laughed weakly. “That code expired twelve years ago.”
Mom crawled toward him and took the card.
“I wrote the original architecture.”
She inserted it into a recessed reader beneath the steel table. The panel flashed red.
ACCESS DENIED.
The gas thickened around our knees.
Ruiz wrapped her sleeve over her mouth. Hale struck the locked door again, his injured arm hanging uselessly.
The false Kelsey spoke through the speakers.
“You have forty seconds.”
Mom stared at the reader, then at her broken glasses.
“The lens,” she said.
I still had the surviving lens sealed inside the evidence sleeve in my jacket. I pulled it free and held it beneath the red emergency light. Lines hidden inside the glass appeared like a miniature circuit map.
Not a ledger.
A key.
Mom pressed the lens against the reader.
The panel turned green.
The ventilation system roared back to life.
Fresh air slammed through the ducts as the steel side door released with a violent metallic crack. Ruiz dragged Shaw. Hale hauled Cross upright. Dad lifted Ryan despite the blood soaking his bandage.
I stayed behind long enough to take the identity packet.
The speaker crackled once more.
This time the woman sounded angry.
“You were supposed to die here.”
I looked directly at the ceiling camera.
“You made one mistake.”
“What mistake?”
“You copied my face before you learned what I do when someone threatens my family.”
The camera light went dark.
May you like
Outside, black SUVs were already moving away from the warehouse. One of them carried the woman who had been assigned my name.
And according to the deployment order in my hand, she was heading for the Pentagon.
