Three hundred wealthy guests watched a maid stop Vanessa’s attack with one hand, never realizing the woman in the gray uniform had once been trained to dismantle dangerous threats.

Inside the dreadnought’s secure research tier, the atmosphere was sterile and quiet. Ethan had been escorted into an observation lounge enclosed in ballistic glass, while Clara was led down a pressurized corridor toward a medical chamber.

"Don't touch her!" Ethan snarled, lunging forward, but two operators intercepted him, their shock prods buzzing.

Ethan didn't back down. The hand-to-hand drills Naomi had run him through during the quiet nights at the estate took over. He sidestepped the first guard's baton, caught the man's wrist, twisted the forearm until bone popped, and drove his elbow straight into the operator's throat.

The guard collapsed with a choked gasp. Ethan snatched the fallen stun rod and turned on the second soldier, his eyes wide and furious.

"Stand down, Ethan," Julian's voice boomed over the room's speakers.

Through the plate glass, Ethan saw Clara strapped into an automated diagnostic chair. A cylindrical glass needle descended toward the crook of her elbow, drawing a vial of luminescent, genetically tagged serum.

"Her mother was not simply a socialite, Ethan," Julian explained, his tone conversational, entirely devoid of fatherly affection. "She was the lead geneticist who mapped the synthetic neural pathways for Generation Nine. The master encryption key to the entire Apex control network was woven into Clara’s genomic code. Marcus thought he could take it by force. Vanessa thought she could buy it. But only the direct lineage can unlock the final mandate."

"You treated your own daughter like a flash drive," Ethan breathed, disgusted to his core.

"I treated her like the future," Julian said. "And now that her genetic sequence has decrypted the network, Naomi's mandate is officially over. The clean-up protocol has already been transmitted to her cortex."

Ethan froze. "What did you say?"