Page 75 of The Monster's Daughter

Then a breath.

A cough.

A groggy, terrified whisper.

“Mom?”

Bella crumbles, pulling her close, crying so hard her body shakes.

I can't move. Not yet. My brain is rebooting in slow fragments, like watching someone piece together stars from shards of black glass.

But I hear Natalie.

I hearher.

No metal. No harmony. Just her.

And even as the blackness drags at my limbs, I feel something beat again inside my chest.

Hope.

It’s terrifying.

CHAPTER 41

BELLA

Kage is breathing, but barely. His chest rises and falls in slow, mechanical intervals, like someone else is puppeting his lungs. His skin’s too pale, his body limp in the sled as I drag him out of the sanctum. The EMP fried every neural path in him—he bought us five minutes, maybe a miracle—but now he’s stuck in a body that hasn’t rebooted yet.

“Don’t you dare die on me,” I mutter, my voice shaking as I shove the hover-sled into motion. “You did your hero thing. You saved her. Now wake the hell up.”

Natalie stirs in my arms, her face wet, streaked with smoke and tears. She’s got one arm wrapped tight around my neck and the other clinging to a stuffed toy that didn’t exist until two minutes ago. It must’ve printed in the sphere—a fail-safe or a final cruelty.

The station is screaming.

Sirens wail overhead, red light pulsing through the curved halls like veins pumping fire. I know the EMP didn’t just knock out Nulegion. It triggered a containment cascade. Every system on this godsdamned station is rerouting, rebooting, recalibrating tocontain the breach.

Me. Kage. Natalie. We’re the breach.

I find a crawlspace beneath a corroded vent shaft and squeeze Natalie in, wrapping her in an emergency cloak and a neural dampener. Her lip trembles.

“Stay here. No sound. No light. If anything that doesn’t smell like Mom shows up—you bite it. Understand?”

She nods. Barely.

I kiss her forehead and slam the hatch closed before I can change my mind. Then I whip around, grab the sled, and start moving.

The corridor's full of whispering walls. Not metaphorical either—literal whispering. The station istalking to itself,syncing cyber-prayers and ritual algorithms. The air smells like metal and singed skin. I run with Kage’s unconscious weight dragging behind me, gun hot in my palm.

One cultist rounds the corner. I shoot her in the throat. Two more drop from the ceiling—I take one through the temple, the other in the gut. The hallway blooms with circuitry-rich blood and scorched wiring.

I don’t flinch. Ican’t.

This isn’t panic anymore. It’s precision. Cold, deliberate. A mother on a mission.

But somewhere along the fourth hall, I hear her.

“Mom.”