Chapter 41 - The Severed Bond
"Marcos!" Mateo’s voice tore from his throat in a raw, jagged sob as the blast of bio-electric energy slammed him against the steel gantry.
The tractor beam hummed with an ear-splitting, harmonic resonance, bathing the shattered rooftop in an eerie, blinding column of azure and gold light. Marcos did not cry out. His body drifted higher, entirely rigid, floating toward the belly of the colossal dreadnought. The golden filigree pulsing across his throat and jaw glowed brighter with every meter he ascended, syncing in terrifying rhythm with the ventral thrusters of *The Sovereign*.
"No! Give me back my son!" Lucía screamed, lunging across the platform. She caught the hem of Marcos’s coat, her fingers locking with desperate, maternal fury. But the invisible kinetic field surrounding him was unyielding. A sharp, crackling arc of static electricity snapped through the air, discharging into Lucía’s palms and throwing her violently across the deck beside Mateo.
"Mother!" Mateo scrambled on his knees, catching her before her head struck the iron railing. His hands trembled, but his mind—trained through countless trials and impossible algorithms—was already firing in desperate, overclocked calculations. He dragged his portable terminal from his battered satchel, his fingers blurring across the keys as he attempted to establish a reverse phase-lock on the dreadnought's tractor emitter.
"It’s no use, little prodigy," Dr. Cassian Cross’s quantum projection purred, his translucent figure hovering beside them like a phantom of cold intellect. "The synthetic core within your brother is calibrated to the exact quantum frequency of *The Sovereign*. You cannot sever the tether without detonating his heart."
"You're a monster, Cassian!" Lucía wheezed, clutching her bruised ribs, tears cutting through the soot on her cheeks. "You planted that inside him when they were infants! Álvaro let you touch them!"
"Álvaro was a cowardly tool who thought he was merely signing off on a genetic enhancement patent," Cassian dismissed with an airy wave of his hand. "He never possessed the vision to understand what we were cultivating. He wanted compliant heirs to parade before his investors. I wanted the singularity. And now, I have it."
Above them, the aperture of the dreadnought’s primary airlock dilated open. Marcos’s golden eyes flickered down toward the deck one last time. For a fraction of a millisecond, the mathematical glare in his gaze softened, replaced by pure, terrified recognition.
*Mateo...*
The silent word echoed not through the air, but directly into the auditory cortex of Mateo’s brain through their innate biometric resonance.
"Marcos! Hold on! I’m coming for you!" Mateo screamed at the sky.
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The heavy blast doors of the ship slammed shut, severing the tractor beam. The column of light vanished, plunging the platform into darkness. With a deafening sonic boom that shattered every remaining pane of glass across the Spire, the dreadnought’s sub-orbital engines ignited, tearing a fiery vacuum through the low storm clouds as it rocketed into the upper stratosphere.
Mateo collapsed onto the rain-slicked iron grating, clutching his chest. Deep beneath his own sternum, a faint, rhythmic pulse echoed in exact, agonizing symmetry with the fading signature of his twin brother.
