Because I know that tone.
Sacrifice tone.
Absolutely not.
“You are not staying down here!”
The blast doors descend lower.
Steel grinding against steel.
Seconds left.
Clay’s grip slips slightly from sweat and blood.
Russ strains behind him trying to pull us both upward.
“HURRY!”
Gabriel suddenly shouts from the reactor terminal:
“WAIT!”
Everyone freezes.
Gabriel stares wildly at the monitor.
“The emergency lock only seals if core radiation stays critical!”
Hope explodes through me.
“What does that mean?!” Russ snaps.
Gabriel’s fingers fly across the console.
“It means if stabilization holds—”
The blast doors suddenly stop.
Halfway closed.
The entire reactor chamber goes still.
Silence crashes through the bunker.
Then slowly—
slowly—
the containment doors begin retracting upward again.
Clay lets out a broken laugh that sounds halfway to a sob.
Russ drags both of us upward onto the reactor platform just as the alarms shift from critical breach…
…to containment stabilized.
And for the first time since entering Ascension—
