All Chapters of Marked by the Alpha Captain: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Liora's scream did not fade.It stayed in Rei's mind, echoing through every memory they had ever shared, until Rei could no longer tell where her fear ended and the Witness's began.Don't let it put me back.Rei stumbled away from the open doorway.Dominic caught her before she fell, one arm wrapping around her waist as the other reached protectively toward Hope.“Rei? Talk to me.”She gripped his shirt.“It's Liora.”“I know.”“No, Dominic. It's really her.”His expression tightened.“What do you mean?”Rei looked through the doorway at the woman bound in the distant chamber. The woman who looked like her. The woman whose eyes held the same ancient silver light that had followed Rei through every world.“Liora isn't just a consciousness that became part of me,” Rei whispered. “She had a body. A life. A history that existed before she became the Witness.”Inside her mind, Liora was trembling.I remember.Rei closed her eyes.“What do you remember?”For a long moment, the Witness didn'

For several seconds, nobody moved.The woman stood in the golden doorway, one hand resting gently on the little girl's shoulder. Her dark hair fell over her shoulders exactly as Liora remembered, and a small crease appeared between her eyebrows whenever she worried. Even the faint scar near her left wrist was there, the one she got when Liora was six, and Aurel tried to climb a tree far too tall for him.Liora remembered the blood.She remembered their mother sitting on the floor beside her bed that night, pressing a cloth against the scrape while Aurel cried harder than the person who had been injured.She remembered her mother's laughter, the warmth of her hands, and the way she used to sing when the storms came.Most of all, Liora remembered standing beside a grave and watching the earth cover the woman who had promised to come back.Their mother had been dead for longer than the Origin had existed.Yet she stood in front of them.Alive.Smiling.Calling them her children.Liora to

For one terrible second, Rei could not recognize her own face.The woman emerging from the darkness wore it perfectly. She had the same dark hair, the same familiar curve of her jaw, and the same small scar near her left eyebrow that Rei had received during one of Blackthorn's earliest experiments. Even the way she tilted her head was familiar, a gesture Rei had seen in mirrors and photographs throughout her life.But the eyes were wrong.They were black from edge to edge, without pupils or the faint silver ring that appeared in Rei's eyes when her power awakened. The First Bond mark stretched across the woman's throat, its three circles fractured and the fourth split open like a wound that had never been allowed to heal.She looked at Thomas with an expression that might once have been love.Now it resembled hunger."My son," she repeated.Thomas backed away from Dominic, shaking his head."No."The woman stopped.For a moment, the blackness in her eyes rippled, and Rei glimpsed some

The sound was not like hundreds of doors opening.It was like hundreds of lives taking their first breath.The staircase erupted with voices. Children called for their mothers. Adults shouted names that had been lost for generations. Some doors opened onto bedrooms, others onto forests, hospital corridors, schoolyards, and houses that had never been built. A few revealed nothing but darkness, and from those rooms came the sound of people crying as though they had just awakened from a dream they could not remember.Rei grabbed Dominic's arm as the staircase lurched."Get everyone back!"Dominic immediately pulled Hope and Thomas behind him while Evan seized Gabriel by the shoulders. Liora caught Aurel before he stumbled down the first step, and Lena moved toward the opening in the ground, searching for a way to close it.But the doors would not stop opening.Every lock fell away.Every name began to glow.And somewhere in the chaos, the little black key slipped from the pale hand and l

Rei couldn't breathe.The young woman standing behind Dominic looked like Hope, but not the Hope Rei had left in the Between. This Hope was taller, perhaps twenty years old, with long silver hair that fell in loose waves down her back. A thin scar crossed her left cheek, and the silver circles beneath her eyes glowed faintly whenever she moved. She wore a dark jacket over a torn gray shirt, and there was dried blood on one sleeve.But it was her expression that frightened Rei most.Hope looked at her mother as if she had spent years searching for her, only to discover that the person she had found no longer remembered who she was."Mom," the older Hope whispered again. "Please tell me you remember."Rei backed away from the bassinet."I don't understand."Dominic stepped inside and closed the front door behind him. He looked older than Rei remembered, but only slightly. His hair was longer, his jaw covered with a short beard, and his shoulders carried a tension that had not been there