Alison stood atop the crumbling spire of the town council, the streets sanding away beneath her feet as her genetic chain snapped. Sarah's brain tissue pulsed in her arms, releasing decoded memory spores, each blossoming into a holographic projection in the morning light-her erased mother humming lullabies in a glass womb, the lyrics the latitude and longitude coordinates of the coal seam.
Jackson's spine stabs out from the rubble, and the control chip embedded in it is converting his remaining life force into encrypted frequencies. As Allison rips out the fluorescent spine and plunges it into the sand, the genetic dust of the entire town of Greystone begins to resonate, reassembling itself in the air as an image of the first mayor's fertilized egg.
"The bloodline ends in a perfect circle." Jackson coughed up blood with a metallic sheen, the exposed alveolar nerves in his dental bed trembling like antennae, "What you burned was just our doppelganger, the real curse is at ..."
Sarah's brain synapses suddenly discharge en masse, and the titanium totem implanted in Allison's retinas begins to refract the truth: three hundred kilometers away, in a geomagnetic station, tens of thousands of frozen embryos are dividing in a pulsed field, each nucleus engraved with her genetic signature.
She breaks Jackson's cervical vertebrae and inserts the tip into the microchip interface of her own carotid artery. As their cerebrospinal fluids met in the metal conduit, Allison saw the full extent of the curse - Greystone was a petri dish for a giant matrix of life, each of its inhabitants a carrier, and her bone marrow was the bio-key that would kick-start the New Age.
As the mushroom cloud from the explosion at the geomagnetic station rises, Allison leaps into the black turbulence of the outfall with Sarah in her arms. The shockwave from the genetic bomb disintegrated them into an alkaline convective storm that rained down on the New Life Rift, mixed with ashes from the confessional.
Three years later, a team of geologists discovered a female silhouette of fluorescent moss in the Rift, which metabolized crystals arranged in a double-helix church. When the lead scientist reached out to take a sample, the crystals suddenly evaporated and condensed into two lines of blood-mist text in his protective mask:
**"True purification never needs fire, when breath is a curse, silence is the purest revenge." **
As night falls, a chord of babies' cries and the pounding of mining logs resonates from the depths of the Rift Valley. Under the moonlight, the patterns of the newborn basalt are slowly forming into a falcon with wings, and deep in the weathered rock layer, a screen of an unactivated cryopod suddenly flashes with the progress of thawing the genetic sequence.