: The hero is now the unintended pawn in a much larger game.
(Does she fire, or is she paralyzed by the betrayal?)
Elias didn’t reach for his keycard. He reached for a glass shard hidden in his sleeve. He pressed his thumb against the sharp edge, letting a single drop of blood fall onto the scanner. The screen didn’t turn red. It turned white. "Welcome back, Director," the voice synthesizer whispered.
Elias sat in the high-backed chair, the shadows stretching long across the floor. He tapped a command on the armrest. On the monitors, the heavy gears of the blast doors began to groan. He wasn't locking them out. He was letting them in.
Outside, the rebellion was hammering at the blast doors. Sarah, the supposed hero of this story, was leading the charge to "shut down" the system Elias had spent years pretending to maintain. She thought she was saving the world from a machine. She didn’t know the machine was the only thing keeping the atmosphere from venting into space.