Human again.
I pull Jillian into my chest, breathing her in like air after drowning.
“You okay?” I murmur into her hair.
She nods, then laughs—short, sharp, half-hysterical. “Remind me never to do that again.”
I huff a breath that might be a laugh. Might be a sob.
Together, we stand amid the wreckage of a god that never should’ve existed.
And this time?—
He doesn’t get to win.
CHAPTER 37
JILLIAN
The station fills with the dull, fleshy thuds of bodies hitting the floor. Even Darwin goes down, slumped like a puppet with its strings cut.
For a second, I think they’re all dead.
I stagger forward, heart punching my ribs. “No. No, no, no?—”
“They’re not gone,” Maug says. His hand wraps around mine, steady as bedrock. “Just stunned. The link—broken.”
I press two fingers to Darwin’s neck. There’s a pulse. Weak, but there.
Relief almost topples me.
But there’s no time for collapse.
Wemove.
Maug and I race toward the medbay, ducking through flickering corridors and broken emergency bulkheads. Lights buzz overhead, flickering like they’re trying to decide if the station is haunted or just barely alive.
“We’ll use the regen injectors,” I say, breathless, already prepping a hypo in my head. “We still have trace vials of your blood left. I can synthesize?—”
“No synthesis,” Maug grunts beside me, his claws curled tight. “Too diluted.”
I nod. “Then we go direct.”
We break into the medbay.
It’s chaos. Empty and full at once—overturned carts, shattered monitors, the smell of disinfectant fighting with fungal residue.
Maug sits without a word, pulls his arm back, exposes a vein without flinching.
I take the blood myself.
It flows, thick and gold-tinged, into the sterile chamber of the hypo.
I test it. Stable. Potent. Clean.
And then we begin.
One by one.
