Chapter 32 - The Phantom Father
The darkness of the subterranean tunnel was absolute, save for the rhythmic, flickering glow of Mateo’s handheld diagnostic tablet. Water dripped from ancient municipal pipes above, splashing against the cold rails of the decommissioned freight tunnel.
Behind them, three muffled detonations rumbled through the earth, shaking dust down from the concrete vaulted ceiling.
Arthur's battle had ended. Whether he had survived or fallen was a question neither boy dared to voice aloud.
"Mom," Marcos said, his breathing ragged as they slowed to a fast jog. "Stop. You have to tell us."
Lucía didn't stop. Her boots splashed frantically through the oily puddles. "We can't stop, Marcos. The Coalition’s clean-up protocol leaves nothing alive within a three-kilometer blast perimeter."
"Mom!" Mateo shouted, stopping dead in his tracks on the rusted cross-ties of the rail line.
The sound echoed through the cavernous gloom. Lucía turned, her face illuminated by the pale cyan glow of the tablet screen. She looked hollow, stripped of the defensive composure she had maintained throughout the trials, the press conferences, and the courtroom battles.
"Who was that man in the recording?" Mateo demanded, his hazel eyes burning with the exact crystalline fire of the face they had seen on the screen. "Álvaro Miller couldn't solve a quadratic equation if his life depended on it. He spent ten years claiming he gave us our minds. But that man... he called us Subject 01 and Subject 02."
"And you recognized him," Marcos added, stepping beside his brother. "You said, 'He was supposed to be dead.'"
Lucía leaned back against the wet concrete wall, sinking down slowly until her knees hit the gravel. She covered her face with trembling hands, a ragged sob escaping her throat before she forcefully reined it in.
"His name is Dr. Cassian Cross," Lucía whispered into the dark. "Twenty-five years ago, before Apex Dynamics, before Julian Vance became a corporate vulture, Cassian was the greatest theoretical geneticist on the planet. He was my fiancé."
The twins stood frozen.
"Cassian didn't believe in the slow crawl of natural evolution," she continued, her voice cracking. "He believed human intellect could be mapped, synthesized, and encoded directly into cellular memory. He partnered with Julian Vance and a shadow consortium known as The Coalition to fund Project Genesis. But when he succeeded... when he perfected the synthetic neural architecture... he realized what they intended to do with it."
"They wanted to weaponize it," Marcos deduced, his mind connecting decades of missing fragments.
"They wanted an aristocracy of engineered minds to rule global markets, autonomous defense networks, and sovereign infrastructure," Lucía said, looking up at her sons. "Cassian tried to destroy the data. The Coalition hunted him. In our panic, he created two viable embryos carrying the complete uncorrupted decryption algorithm of the architecture—you two."
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"And Álvaro?" Mateo asked, a bitter taste rising in his throat.
"Álvaro was a greedy, vain lab assistant who cleaned the testing floors," Lucía said with contempt. "He owed five million dollars to offshore bookmakers. I paid off his debts and gave him a forged life in exchange for putting his name on your birth certificates. The Coalition was looking for Cassian's bloodline, not an insignificant, deadbeat accountant. Álvaro was our human shield."
