“No!” I scream, thrashing as a heavy, gloved hand hauls me over the gunwale.
I hit the deck of the police boat—no, the Extraction Craft. The floor beneath me hums with the vibration of a nuclear core. I look at the man holding me down. He’s wearing a blue uniform with a badge that says Officer Miller, but when the strobe light of the helicopter hits him, his face dissolves. His skin turns to liquid silver, his eyes becoming glowing optical sensors.
“Stay down, kid!” Miller shouts.
I hear Ryker beside me, his head slammed against the deck. He’s staring at the burning wreckage of the Mercy, his eyes bleeding tears of pure mercury.
“The ledger…” Ryker gasps, his fingers clawing at the empty air. “She took the ledger into the core! The data is fusing!”
“Look at the water!” I howl, pointing at the spot where Hallow vanished.
The fire is gone. In its place, a massive, underwater city is rising. A sprawling metropolis of neon glass and silver spires, hidden beneath the harbour for decades. I see Hallow. She’s not burning. She’s floating in a golden stasis field, being pulled down toward the central spire. The Mother is standing there—a thousand feet tall, made of light and static, her arms open to receive the prototype.
“She’s home,” I whisper, my heart shattering. “She’s finally home.”
“He’s going into shock!” a voice screams—a real voice, high and panicked.
I feel a sharp sting in my neck. A sedative.
The silver city flickers. The neon spires turn intothe rotted, barnacle-covered pilings of the North Pier. The Mother’s light becomes the harsh, flickering neon of a ‘Donuts’ sign on the shore. Officer Miller’s face returns—he’s just a man with a moustache and a look of profound pity.
“It’s okay, son,” Miller says, his voice muffled by the sound of the rain. “You’re safe now.”
Safe. The word is the biggest lie of all.
They zip me into a thermal blanket, but it feels like a straitjacket. They’re not taking us to a hospital. They’re taking us back to the Hive. The ambulance waiting on the pier isn’t a vehicle; it’s a mobile containment unit.
As they wheel me off the boat, the world glitches one last time.
I look at the crowd of onlookers gathered behind the yellow tape. They aren’t citizens. They are rows of identical clones, all wearing Hallow’s face, all wearing the white lace dress. Thousands of them, standing in perfect silence, watching the “Redundant Brothers” being hauled away.
I look at Ryker on the stretcher next to mine. He’s staring at the sky, laughing a wet, jagged sound.
“She’s in the clouds, Jex,” Ryker whispers, his eyes fixed on a searchlight beam. “She’s the signal now. We can’t shut her off.”
The doors of the ambulance slam shut, and the siren begins to wail. To the world, it’s a warning. To me, it’s the Mother humming us a final, terrifying lullaby.
Chapter
Thirty-Five
JEX
The ambulance didn’t have a floor. It felt like we were floating over an abyss of asphalt and sirens. Every time the tires hit a pothole, the “mobile containment unit” flickered. The heart monitor beeped—thump-hiss, thump-hiss—and for a second, it was the sound of the Mother’s heels on the cellar stairs.
Then, the doors open.
I’m wheeled into a corridor where the lights are so bright they feel like physical needles. The nurses in blue scrubs have blurred faces, their features sliding like wet paint. One of them leans over me, and her eyes are silver cameras.
“Asset Jex is experiencing a reality-lapse,” she says. Her voice is the hum of a server rack. “Increase the dosage of the ‘Truth.’”
“No! Get off me!” I struggle against the leather straps, but they aren’t leather. They are coils of fibre-optic cable, pulsing with a faint blue light, syncing with the rhythm of my heart.
They wheel me into a room that is nothing but a white box. No windows. No furniture. Just a single steel chair and a mirror that goes on forever. They dump me into the chair and the door seals with a hiss that sounds like a final breath.
I sit there for a thousand years. Or maybe ten seconds.
The wall across from me begins to bleed. Not red—black, oily ink that forms the shape of a woman. She doesn’t have a face, just a silhouette made of static and old radio signals.
