Alison's scalpel sliced open the bruise on her left arm and extracted the microchip buried under the skin for years-the tracking device the Jacksons had implanted in their illegitimate child, with Sarah's birth number engraved on the edge. The moment the chip is dipped into the bleach, the town's streetlights go out, and moonlight pours in through the cracks in the clouds, weaving a DNA double-spiral grating on the ground.
In the cold storage room of the abandoned slaughterhouse, twenty iced coffins are arranged in a chromosome sequence. Screens embedded in the lids of each casket show the "purification ritual" from a different year: Alison sees her face in a 1983 video, and as a baby she is held down by Grandfather Jackson in a baptismal font, the water glowing silver-blue with aluminum heat.
"Memory transplantation is the final step in blood purification." Jackson's voice blared over the cold room radio, mingling with the sound of hydraulic pressure from the robotic arms. The old wound on the back of Allison's neck suddenly burns, and fluorescent codes emerge from beneath the scar-the authentication barcodes burned into the implant from her false childhood.
She finds Sarah in Ice Casket 19, covered in tubes. Her sister's temples are encrusted with quartz ports, and a fiber-optic cable extending from her spine connects to a refrigerated brain, where a screen displays the progress of the memory upload: 97.4%. Sarah's eyelids flutter in a white mist of cryo, and her frozen voice squeezes out the broken words, "...underground river...rinse tank...our umbilical cord...".
Alison drags the ice coffin into the meatpacking area, its dangling hooks cutting through the cold fog. As she connects Sarah's brain to the terminal of the automated boning machine, the meat grinder at the end of the conveyor belt spits out a hard disk of sticky placenta tissue. The decoded files are projected in a splash of blood-their real mother is locked in a glass womb deep in the vein, her umbilical cord connected to the town council's underground hematopoietic stem cell factory.
Allison was stabbing a chainsaw into her hip when Jackson's armed hound crashed through the metal roll-up door. The titanium alloy key embedded in the bone marrow was coated with bone chips, and it was inserted precisely into the certified slot in Sarah's brain. For the first time, the sisters' brainwaves synchronized in pain, and the memories of Greystone's centuries-old dead poured into their consciousness like melting lead.
"Reactivate purification process." Sarah's voice poured from three hundred loudspeakers as the abattoir's laser cutters began to disintegrate the ice coffins. Jackson's screams mingled with the last words of the mayors in an electromagnetic pulse, and Allison watched as her skin peeled away inch by inch, revealing the titanium family totem underneath-both the brand of damnation and the ultimate key to detonating the underground blood factory.
The moonlight reaches critical brightness at this moment, and the instant Allison leaps into the cooling pool, a nuclear-level bioelectric pulse races along the underground river. All the townspeople implanted with crystals begin to vomit silver blood, the church steeple bends into a double helix in a genetically-charged explosion, and Jackson's gold teeth, embedded in the walls of the town hall, are being dislodged one by one as the keys to the confessional.
In the last darkness before dawn, Allison carries Sarah's remaining brain tissue towards the outfall. The radar screen showed the town's foundations were calcifying, and her eyelashes, coagulated with the evaporated legacies of her blood relatives, shimmered like broken pairs of lye in the morning sun.