Chapter 35 · Chrome & Blood Symphony

"You gave her everything, didn't you?" Caspar's slow clap echoed off the server spire, and the shockwave knocked me sideways. "How sweet. How fucking stupid."

My knees hit the deck hard. Chrome screamed.

Blue arcs were eating up my arms, crawling under the skin, popping out at the elbows and the throat. Not Echo's clean light. Wild. Hungry. My heart was hammering at like two hundred beats a minute and my vision kept glitching in and out, code bleeding over concrete.

"Vera, stay with me," Echo said inside my head, but his voice wasn't inside anymore. It was everywhere. In my teeth. In my blood. "You're running too hot. You gotta breathe."

"I'm breathing," I spat, and blood hit the floor. Real blood. Hot and coppery. "You dump a goddamn sun into my chest and tell me to breathe?"

Caspar laughed. He stood twenty feet up on the central dais, arms open, cables snaking into his spine like he owned the place. Which, yeah, he kind of did. The whole grid pulsed under him.

"She's rejecting it," he said to no one, to everyone. His voice came through every speaker in the tower. "Look at her.