Chapter 15 · Mom in the Machine

The voice came out of the core like a ghost bleeding through bad speakers.

"Mara."

Not her name in some synthetic text-to-speech. Her name in her mom's voice. The exact way she used to say it when Mara tracked mud into the lab, or stayed up past midnight rewiring a broken comm unit, or asked the wrong question about the man in the clean suit who kept visiting before everything went dark.

Mara's throat closed.

Kade's hand tightened on her wrist. His pulse hammered against her skin. "That's—"

"My mom." The words came out flat. She couldn't make them do anything else.

The core sat on the table between them and Silas, its display flickering pale green in the dim backroom. Silas hadn't moved. He stood three feet away with his hands loose at his sides, but his eyes tracked every microexpression on Kade's face like he was reading a manual.

"Curious," Silas said. "It shouldn't have a voice encoder. We scrubbed the personality matrix years ago."

Mara's stomach dropped. "You what?"

"Dr. Vey's work was proprietary. Oryx retained the research. The woman herself was..." Silas tilted his head. "Incidental."

Kade shifted. Not much.