All Chapters of The Surrogate’s Blade: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

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 coherent spear of my own frequency, straight into the white shape that was built and grown and maintained to drink exactly that frequency, and I overload it the way you blow out a speaker by feeding it a single note louder than it was ever rated to carry.The White-Glow staggers in the breached doorway.Its light stutters, the gathered killing-glare in its palm collapsing back in on itself unfired, and for one half-second, the exact half-second Damian promised me, it stands blind and deaf and reeling in its own element, a god drowning in too much of the one thing it lives on, undone for an instant by an excess of its own diet.But even as it reels, I feel the thing the jam cannot reach. Undern

The countdown lives behind my eyes now as a red figure, the Director's five minutes, and every breath I take spends it faster, because every breath feeds the engine and the engine is eating me toward the burn.My pulse is past two hundred and climbing. The cold drain at my center widens with each beat. The scorched tang on my breath thins as the oxygen in my lungs goes to the furnace instead of to my brain.I am the bomb and I am the clock at once. The clock is mine. And it is running down toward a detonation that takes me with it when it goes.Slower, I tell my own lungs, the way my father taught me to tell a racing heart. Spend less. Last longer. They do not listen. They were not built to listen tonight.Damian has me by the arm again, dragging me the last stretch of the spine toward the hangar. He talks fast and low against my ear, the shuttle, the fuel, Julian already aboard and strapped in, Sarah at the controls running the engines

He drives the needle into me.Not into the empty crib. Not into the air. Into the soft place low beneath my ribs where my own hand is pressing his, past the burning mother and into the gathering child, exactly where I told him the fire had gone.The needle is long, meant to reach deep, and I feel every inch of it go. My belly clenches against the intrusion before my mind can tell it not to, the muscle wall drawing hard as a fist around the steel, and lower, my womb contracts in one long involuntary cramp that doubles me over his arm. Gooseflesh climbs my skin from the puncture outward, the surface going pale and faintly silver where the lattice surges up to meet the breach.Damian's jaw is locked. His hand never slows. I feel the cost of that steadiness travel down his arm into the plunger.Driving forty thousand calories through a pregnant woman's abdominal wall, on her own dying word, is a thing no part of his training ever sanctioned, and he does it an

The hangar is the one part of the estate the fire has not yet reached. A cold steel cavern at the far end of the service spine, the shuttle at its center with its doors open and its engines climbing toward a scream and Sarah's face in the cockpit window, her hand raised in a signal that means now.We are forty feet from it. Forty feet from sky, and ocean, and the long flight to my brother.Forty feet.I have crossed worse distances tonight. A corridor full of grey gods. A nursery floor with my own death gathering under my heart. But this is the one that matters, because on the far side of it is the first open air I will have breathed since I walked into Damian Morton's lobby a lifetime and three weeks ago and started counting his exits.The Nutri-Sync is steady in my blood now. The furnace banked and full. The silver running deep and quiet instead of burning at the surface.For the first time all night I am not dying.I am only walking towar

The hangar fills with the scrape of stone on steel. Hiss, pause, hiss. Three and two and one. My count. My father's count. The rhythm of the soul I thought no one alive could reach.Damian kneels on the cold floor by the shuttle ramp and sharpens the obsidian blade to it, unhurried, while the estate burns down behind the bulkhead and the engines climb at our backs.He does not stop when I come to stand over him.I have heard that rhythm in only two mouths in my life.My father's hands, in a kitchen, teaching me that an edge is a discipline and not a threat. And my own, every night since, alone, keeping faith with a dead man.Hearing it come off this man's hands closes something in my chest and opens something else, and I do not have a name for either, and I do not reach for one.He finishes the edge, tests it against his thumb, and only then looks up.And he holds it. Back in the burning hangar, with his brother's gun on his chest, he