Lahat ng Kabanata ng Cold As My Heart: Kabanata 21 - Kabanata 30

The satellite storm hit harder than expected.Debris rained from orbit scorched plating from a derelict Nexus drone, dislodged by a gravity drift Sera hadn’t anticipated. The impact alarms screamed through the ship’s hull. Lira swore in three languages as the control console lit up with damage reports.Sera was already halfway to the airlock.“Where are you going?” Adrian called after her.“There’s a breach near the cargo hold. Something came through.”“I’m coming with you.”Sera didn’t argue not because she wanted help, but because she was too tired to fight him. The connection with WRATH had left her nerves raw, her tether still humming in low resonance.She didn’t tell anyone that sometimes…She could still hear it breathing.The hold was lit in emergency red, casting shadows like bloodstains across the floor. The object that breached the hull was jagged, black, partially melted but not just wreckage.It was a message pod.Adrian read the scan. “Encrypted. Mira’s signal architectur

The child was silent.Eyes wide. Breathing shallow.Wrapped in a thermal blanket from Adrian’s pack, she clung to Sera’s side as they moved through the Cradle’s collapsing hallways. The facility’s emergency grid was failing. Heat was dropping by the second. Gravity had begun to buckle, drawing debris into quiet spirals along the floor.But the girl, barely nine, biologically perfect, wasn't afraid.She was watching.Studying.“Does she have a name?” Adrian asked gently, walking beside them.Sera looked down at her.The girl tilted her head slightly, a perfect mirror of Sera’s own expression.“No,” Sera said. “But I think she’ll choose one.”Behind them, Syra walked in silence. Disarmed. Wounded. Not by a weapon but by what she had lost.“She was the only version I made without Mira,” Syra whispered, her voice jagged. “No directives. No subroutines. Just pure structure. Built from your echo.”Sera didn’t respond.Syra went on anyway.“She would’ve been better.”Sera stopped walking.Tu

The ship floated in deep drift.No destination.No agenda.Just space.Sera hadn’t spoken in three hours.She sat alone in the lower systems bay, one hand resting lightly against the glass of Zero’s cradle. Not in fear. Not in pity.In something like recognition.She could feel the quiet buzz of the dormant core inside her. Not active. Not threatening.Just waiting.Like a final note that hadn’t been played yet.On the bridge…Lira watched Astra like she was a lit fuse.The girl was calm, too calm. She sat cross-legged beside the nav console, drawing again. Same symbols. Same spirals. Except now, she was starting to repeat them.Lira finally asked, “What are you drawing?”Astra glanced up, then held out the datapad.Lira frowned.It wasn’t a picture.It was a key.A sequence. Old Mira code. Buried formatting decrypted without a guide.Lira stiffened. “Where did you learn this?”Astra blinked. “I didn’t. I just... remembered it.”Below deck…Elias studied the repeating data loop runnin

The ship had stopped moving.But not because it was adrift.Because something was holding it.Outside, beyond the viewing ports, thousands of once-dead satellites had aligned in a perfect arc, a formation too precise to be instinct, too inhuman to be coordinated by chance.They weren’t aimed to fire.They were aimed to listen.To Syra.In the cradle chamber…Sera stood inches from the glass, watching Syra’s body flicker between light and shadow. She was no longer restrained, not physically. The machine around her was breaking down on a molecular level, not due to force, but from a rewrite loop originating inside her neural stem.“She’s not stabilizing,” Elias shouted over comms. “She’s collapsing into an identity recursion.”“What does that mean?” Adrian called back.“It means she’s being overwritten by Kirin.”“No,” Sera whispered, staring at Syra. “She’s fighting it.”Inside the neural planeSyra’s mindscape wasn’t coherent anymore.The battlefield had fractured.She stood ankle-dee

The ship’s heartbeat changed.Not engines, not power flow an echo, felt more than heard. A soft hum moving through bulkheads, consoles, conduit lines. Not cold. Not threatening.But alive.Sera stood in the observation bay alone, watching the orbital map redraw itself in real time. The satellites that once served Mira’s fear and Kirin’s recursion now drifted in soft, shifting formations no longer weapons, not yet free.Each pulse synced to a single root signature:ASTRA.ROOTBehind her, Adrian stepped in quiet as a breath. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to.When he placed his hands on her shoulders, she let the warmth ground her.The tension between them had never really left it waited at the edge of every crisis, every quiet moment they stole.Tonight, it felt more dangerous than the machines in orbit.“You keep looking at them like they’re going to attack,” he said, his voice low against her ear.Sera breathed out a bitter laugh. “I keep looking at them like they’re waiting for per