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홈 / Romance / The Surrogate’s Blade / Chapter 32 Shadow Play

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Chapter 32 Shadow Play

작가: R.J. Sterling
last update 게시일: 2026-05-25 00:16:07
Marcus’s fingers brush the felt of the mobile, and I make my decision in the space between two of his heartbeats. I don’t blink. I don’t breathe wrong.

I lie there with my joints locked under the silk, watching him through the slit of my eyelids, my heart a serrated rhythm I drag down to a flat, deliberate stop.

To the shackle on my wrist, to the Argus pod overhead, to Marcus Vane turning the gutted star over in his glove, I am a sedated woman, deep in the chemical sleep his brother’s doctor pre
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  • The Surrogate’s Blade   Chapter 125 The Harvest Floor

    The boy starts to cry before he makes a sound.His face does not change much. That is what breaks it. A tear slides down one cheek while his mouth stays slack and obedient, the restraint under his shirt blinking black-green-black against his ribs.The red plastic boat lies upside down between us.Sarah aims at the restraint.“No shot.”“I know.”“It’s wired into him.”“I know.”The boy says, “Trust says you have to come now.”His voice is flat again, borrowed.Then, under it, tiny and real:“Please.”The child inside me answers with heat. I lock both hands over my stomach. No.Not every child in pain gets to pull the fire out of me. That is a sentence I can barely survive thinking, and it is true anyway.Mara kneels slowly.“Eli.”The boy’s eyes flicker. Family name.&ldq

  • The Surrogate’s Blade   Chapter 124 One Room Down

    We cannot take Nell with us.The next dirty fact lands.No one argues with it.Hale wraps the blue blanket tighter around the child and carries her toward the laundry route with Orrin and Jo pressed close behind. Finn appears long enough to point them into a service lift that smells of bleach and old steam.No speeches. No thank-you.The doors close on Nell’s pale face and Hale’s shaking hands.Sarah watches until the lift drops.“She needs fluids.”“Can you get them?”“Not from here.”It is all we have time for.Need without access, written in the tremor of Sarah’s jaw and the empty pouch where her saline should have been. Another entry on the list no one has time to read aloud.The corridor behind us shifts from amber to red. Finished line has found the jammed gate. Trust has found the fetal signal again. Somewhere far above or below, Damian has

  • The Surrogate’s Blade   Chapter 123 The City That Eats Silence

    No one speaks. That is our first mistake.The waste gate shudders again. One tiny knock from the other side, then a scrape. Jo or Orrin trying not to panic. Hale trying to keep three children warm under contaminated linen while the second gate decides whether they are laundry, waste, or meat.Sarah points to the manual wheel. Renn limps toward it. The wall above the gate lights.STRESS SILENCE DETECTED.I stare at the words.Renn says, “It has an opinion about not talking?”“It has an opinion about everything,” Mara says.The wall updates.GROUP VOCAL SUPPRESSION CORRELATED WITH DECEPTION EVENT.TRUST RESPONSE: HEART-RATE ANALYSIS.The floor warms under my boots, just a few degrees, enough to tell me the city is listening through feet, blood, breath, and sweat.Sarah raises one hand.“Everyone talk.”Renn grabs the wheel.“About what?”

  • The Surrogate’s Blade   Chapter 122 The Line Between Us

    The power stack route arrives as a headache.Leo does not send it to the wrist unit.He sends it through the ghost model he burned into me, and for one second the maintenance throat vanishes under blue lines. Stairs. Valves. Service ladders. Heat plumes. Door states. The whole city reassembled behind my eyes with a red path running down through its spine.I grab the wall. Sarah catches my elbow.“Talk.”“Power stack.”“Now?”“He sent coordinates.”Damian’s speaker snaps with static.“Do not follow them yet.”Leo’s text appears on Sarah’s wrist unit at the same time.FOLLOW NOW.Renn looks from the wall to the wrist.“Family meeting?”Mara says, “Worst one I have ever attended.”The route in my head pulses.It wants speed.Leo always was impatient when he thought the

  • The Surrogate’s Blade   Chapter 121 What a Product Knows

    The service door seals behind us with my face on the other side.For a few seconds, nobody speaks.We are packed in a maintenance throat built for pipes, not people. Sarah is bleeding from the corner of her mouth where one clone clipped her. Renn’s bad leg shakes. Mara has one arm under Caleb’s ribs, keeping him upright through sheer refusal.I have clear fluid under my nails.It dries sticky. Not like blood.I keep staring at it. Sarah notices first.“Elena.”“It would have carried better.”She does not ask what I mean.Sarah does not ask.Useful cruelty. She knows when naming a wound only makes it bleed louder.Renn says, “Are we doing self-loathing now? Because I would like a chair.”Mara snaps, “Stop.”“No. If she folds because one lab-grown mirror said she’s unstable, we all get packed into boxes.”I look

  • The Surrogate’s Blade   Chapter 120 Her Reflection Moves First

    They drop like a bad memory learning gravity.Five bodies. My face on all of them. Same left eye, same mouth, same blunt shape of the chin my mother used to pinch when she wanted me to stop scowling.None of them scowl.They land around us in a clean ring.Sarah fires into the nearest throat.The clone takes the round, staggers one step, and keeps moving.“I hate that,” Sarah says.“Aim for joints.”“I did.”“Aim meaner.”Renn drags herself upright with one leg still half-dead. Mara pulls Caleb behind the service door, but he resists at the last second, staring at the ring of finished faces.“They look like her.”Renn snaps, “Thank you, nursery education.”The white restraint on my wrist tightens.Suppression crawls up my arm, cold and granular, like crushed glass under the skin. I cannot burn properly through it. G

  • The Surrogate’s Blade   Chapter 72 The Siege Begins

    I jam it. I do not broadcast the way I did in the medical wing, wide, indiscriminate, thrown at the whole room to wake the cameras and flood the sensors. I do the precise opposite of that.I take the entire silver tide that I have left in me, every scrap the IV bought back, and I aim it, a single c

  • The Surrogate’s Blade   Chapter 68 The Truth in the Steel

    Three. Two. One.I dug my heels into the reinforced floor of the War Room, bracing against the internal tide.Damian didn’t move. He stood fifty feet below the Atlantic’s churn, offering me the very throat he’d used to order my family’s erasure. My fingers cr

  • The Surrogate’s Blade   Chapter 66 The Scouring of the Wing

    The tapping stopped.The silence that followed was a vacuum in the ventilation where a ghost had just mirrored my most private ritual.I lay pinned to the medical mattress, my pulse a frantic, syncopated thump against Damian Morton’s palm. The stench of fried circuitry from the shattered ultrasound

  • The Surrogate’s Blade   Chapter 63 The Falsified Fate

    —fire.Damian didn’t finish the sentence.The secondary vault doors slammed home with a hydraulic hiss that swallowed the roar of the surface. Silence followed—heavy, pressurized, and tasting of ozone. We were two hundred feet below the estate, encased in enough reinforced concrete to weather a nuc

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