Page 34 of The Monster's Daughter

Her voice drops. “We run together. Or we don’t run at all.”

The wind howls between us.

Then I nod, slow. “Then we make it count.”

She exhales like she’s been holding her breath for days. “Good.”

A sound rises over the ridges—a metallic howl, low and rolling, like a thousand gears grinding at once. The ground vibrates.

Bella’s face drains of color. “What is that?”

I rise to my feet, claws digging into the gravel. “It.”

On the far edge of the plain, a shape uncoils. Massive, serpentine, made of shattered drones and scaffolded limbs lashed together with glistening silver gel. It drips nanite fluid like blood, its body flickering where it’s not fully formed, like a nightmare still deciding what shape to take.

It raises a head, or something like one, studded with sensor nodes. The nodes flare red.

Bella steps up beside me, her hand brushing mine. Her palm is small, warm, slick with her own blood.

“Holy hell,” she whispers.

I bare my teeth. “Run.”

“Together,” she says.

“Together,” I echo.

We sprint across the open rubble, the beacon a thin pulse of light ahead of us. Every step jostles her wound, every breath scrapes my throat raw. The ground underfoot crunches, slippery with ash.

Behind us, the howl rises. The thing moves—not walking, not slithering, but flowing, its body reconfiguring as it goes, claws sprouting and retracting, limbs scaffolding out to grip rock. The silver fluid splashes, hissing where it lands.

“Faster!” Bella gasps.

I scoop her up without thinking, her weight nothing against my chest. Her heart hammers against my arm. “Hold on.”

She clings to my neck, breath hot against my jaw. “Don’t you dare drop me.”

“Not a chance,” I growl.

The beacon pulses brighter, like a heartbeat calling us home.

The air tastes like metal now, every inhale a burn. The sky above flickers faintly, like a signal scrambled.

It’s not just chasing us. It’spressingon us, a weight inside my skull, a hiss under my skin.

Bella’s voice is a gasp against my ear. “It’s in the air?—”

“I know.”

“Then keep going,” she says. “We’re not done yet.”

And I run, the ground blurring beneath my claws, the beacon beating like a star ahead, the monster’s howl rising behind us like the sound of the world breaking.

We run together.

Or not at all.

CHAPTER 21