Page 78 of The Monster's Daughter

I tap the comm port behind my ear.

“Override protocol seventy-nine. Legacy permissions. Grolgath warlink. Open the network.”

A hiss of static. Then the hum.

I’m in.

The digital worldhits like lightning. My synapses scream as my perception tears sideways into code-space.

I’m flying. Not through air. Through memory. Throughher.

The nanite field is chaos—fractured light and writhing black strands, code woven with emotion, neural echoes pulsing like heartbeats. And then, I see her.

Bella.

Not her body. Hersoul.A shimmering form of thought and light, radiant and ragged, battling a coiling mass of darkness that pulses like a heartbeat made of knives.

Nulegion.

It turns as I enter. Sees me. Screeches.

Bella turns too. Her glow stutters.

“Kage?” Her voice is raw, desperate. “You shouldn’t be here?—”

“Too fucking bad,” I snarl.

She’s fighting with everything she is. Flashes of her life shimmer around her—Natalie’s laugh, our first kiss, the night she threw a wrench at my head. I see it all. Feel it. It buoys me.

I charge into the fray.

Nulegion hits like a void. A storm of pure logic. It claws into me, tries to rewrite me from the inside. I shove back, bury it under images—Bella in my arms, Natalie in the park, laughter, tears, rage. It hisses, convulses.

Bella grabs my hand. “Together.”

We press forward, memory to memory, hacking into the heart of the shadow.

“You remember the beach on Voltren?” she gasps.

“You made fun of my sunburn for a week.”

“Youpeeledlike an onion.”

We laugh. The shadow flinches.

“That time I got shot and you screamed at the medics?—”

“Because you bled like apsychoand flirted mid-triage.”

More laughter. The code around us sizzles.

We keep pushing. Through every shard of who we were. Every time I thought I hated her. Every time I knew I didn’t. Every second we spent apart and ached because of it.

And love.

Love threads through everything.

Love isn’t soft. It’s fire. And we set the void alight.