Pure love.
Pure desperation.
Gabriel suddenly shouts:
“NOW!”
No more time.
I kiss Clay hard.
Fast.
Desperate.
Everything I feel poured into one second.
Then I tear myself away before I lose the ability to do it at all.
And I run for the lower reactor ladder.
“HANNAH!”
I hear him behind me.
But I can’t stop.
Because forty-three children are somewhere above us fighting for freedom.
Because Ascension has other facilities.
Because Wu cannot be allowed to erase the truth.
Because somebody has to end this.
Heat slams into me as I descend toward the reactor core chamber below.
Blinding blue light pulses through cracked containment walls.
The coolant system is failing catastrophically now.
Steam burns against my skin.
Alarms deafen me.
And beneath the screaming reactor—
I finally see it.
The manual stabilization chamber.
One lever.
One emergency override wheel.
And flooding the entire lower platform—
radiation coolant leaking across the floor.
