Chapter 20 · Forbidden Resonance

"Kai, stop fighting me!" Eve drove my shoulders into the metal table as every light in the lab flashed red.

"Get off!" I shoved at her chest. "Your voice is inside my skull!"

"Because you ate the hound!"

"It was trying to kill us!"

"You didn't kill it. You swallowed its entire protocol!"

The room split into six copies around me. Six Eves. Six tables. Six walls crawling with black cables and dead screens.

Only one of her hands was real.

I grabbed that wrist and squeezed. Her pulse jumped under my fingers.

"Find the real one," she snapped.

"You're all real enough to be annoying."

"Kai. Look at me."

"I am looking at you. Which one?"

Her face blurred, then snapped back into place. Pale skin. Silver eyes. A small cut under her jaw from the lab door. Her black coat was torn at the shoulder, and her breath hit my mouth every time she leaned closer.

The closeness should have distracted me.

Instead, her heartbeat slammed through my hand like a second alarm.

The Protocol inside my blood answered it.

The walls screamed.

I twisted hard. Eve lost her balance, and I dragged her down with me.