Novel-novel oleh Odis Clare

Some things don’t end with fire.Some endings arrive with silence.The kind that coats your skin like frost. That makes your breath hitch in your throat even when nothing is choking you.The kind of silence that says someone is watching.That was the silence inside the evac pod as we descended from HALCYON.Wren curled against my side, her eyes open but unseeing, her mind still echoing with frequencies not meant for flesh. I held her tighter than I should have, as if squeezing hard enough could keep her soul tethered to this world.Clara flew.Fast.Reckless.And for once, I didn’t yell.Because the stars were wrong.They blinked like eyes now.Twelve of them.Clara didn’t speak until we broke Earth’s gravity field and connected to our cloaked ground base buried beneath the Icelandic ashline.She turned in her seat, face pale, voice sharp.“Ivy.”I nodded. “I saw them.”“Twelve. Same broadcast frequency. Same neural wave signature. All activated simultaneously.”I leaned forward, hea

They say power comes in threes.Three strands to every story—what is, what was, and what should never be.But no one warned me what would happen when those three collided.Not in a whisper.Not in a scream.And certainly not with the voice that fractured the air inside HALCYON’s glass cathedral.A voice that didn’t belong to Rhea.Or to Wren.Or to any human thing.The lights above us dimmed, not like a power failure, but like obedience. As if something greater had entered the room—and even the stars outside dared not look in.And then, it spoke.“She was only ever the opening note.”My breath caught in my throat. My body froze, chilled beneath layers of engineered heat-skin. The words weren’t heard so much as felt—vibrating in the marrow, crawling beneath the skin, brushing against thought itself like fingers sliding across piano wire.Lucien stepped in front of me instinctively, shielding me with his frame. But I saw the tension in his neck. The way his spine straightened. That sou

They say the sky broke that morning.It wasn’t a storm.It was her voice.Not the soft lilt of a child.Not even the cold steel of a machine.It was both.And neither.The voice that echoed across Earth’s satellites, hijacked every comm link, and burned itself into the atmosphere was unmistakably hers.“I am the Architect Reborn.Welcome to the Age of Design.”I dropped the comm pad as if it had burned me.Lucien stood frozen beside me, eyes fixed on the trembling screen as transmission after transmission bled into every corner of human communication.She was everywhere.She had become omnipresent.Clara’s call came in seconds later.“She’s in everything, Ivy.”Her voice shook. That alone chilled me.“She’s overridden six national firewalls. Our own synthetic defense grids are standing down. All because of her voiceprint. She carries your neural map. And the Architect’s. Combined.”“She’s speaking through her?”“No,” Clara breathed. “She is her now.”I didn’t know if I wanted to

They say the human mind has a defense mechanism—one that wraps trauma in shadows, tucks it into a corner, and builds a door you forget how to open.But what happens when the lock unpicks itself?What happens when you remember the girl who disappeared?And realize she was you all along?The storm had crawled across the horizon long before the rain started falling.I stood at the edge of the balcony, Lucien’s coat wrapped tight around my shoulders even though the wind didn’t bite. The sky above HALCYON Base was a blistering bruised violet, lit by data surges rather than lightning. The whole station thrummed with energy. Alive. Too alive.Behind me, Wren slept. Or pretended to.She hadn’t spoken since the last transmission.The one that whispered my name in a voice that wasn’t human.I pressed my palms against the cold steel railing.What scared me most wasn’t what the voice had said.It was that it knew me.Not the woman I had become.But the girl I used to be.I closed my

IvyClara didn’t knock.She burst into my quarters, breathless, holding a blinking holopad like it was a live grenade. Lucien was already on his feet, his hand instinctively reaching for the sidearm he no longer carried. Wren—still asleep, her tiny frame curled beneath the folds of a weighted blanket—stirred but didn’t wake.Clara’s voice cut through the dim room like frost.“They found her.”The chill in my chest spread instantly.I stood. “Who?”She turned the holopad around.A glowing sigil blinked on the screen: the V inside a fractured circle.VIRELLA.“They initiated Recovery Protocol,” Clara said. “Silent fleet. No comms. No pings. No signatures. But I intercepted a ripple in our satellite shell when their cloaking failed for 0.4 seconds.”“How long?” Lucien asked.“Two hours, maybe less.”Lucien swore.I crossed the room and picked up Wren.She didn’t stir.My voice was raw. “They’re not taking her.”We moved fast.Lucien rerouted the shuttle’s trajectory, aiming for a de

There are six of them.Six children born of my blood, forged from fragments of a genome I never consented to share. And one of them—one—now carries the ghost of a woman I thought I had finally buried.The Architect.She didn't die in me.She escaped.Now she’s somewhere inside them.I stood in the observation chamber as their stasis pods hissed softly, lined like sleeping angels beneath cool blue light. They looked peaceful. Fragile. Too small to carry something so monstrous.Lucien stood beside me, his arms folded tightly across his chest, every muscle drawn tight like a loaded weapon.Clara’s voice broke the silence: “We scanned every neural feed. No anomalies. No spikes. But it’s in there. I can feel it. A whisper in the code.”“How do we find out which one?” I asked.Clara hesitated. “We can’t. Not without risking full awakening.”“So we’re blind.”“Not blind,” she said. “Just... uncertain.”Lucien’s jaw clenched. “We should isolate them.”“No,” I said instantly.He