Chapter 12 · The Voice She Built

"Don't touch it."

Cade's hand locked around my wrist before my fingers reached the console. His grip was cold, tight enough to bruise.

"Let go," I said.

"You don't know what that thing does."

"I built it."

His jaw tightened. "No. You didn't."

I twisted free and stepped past him. The prototype sat in the center of the lab like a piece of exposed bone—white polymer shell, neural mesh threaded through the core, and a pulsing amber ring where the reset anchor should've been. I'd seen this design before. In my notebook. In the fragments Nix kept feeding me in pieces.

"Mara." Cade moved between me and the machine. "We have eight minutes. If the nine-hour loop kicks in—"

"I know what happens."

"Then you know we need to shut it down now."

"I need to see it first."

"See what?"

I pushed past him. My palm hit the console and the screen lit up—schematics, activation logs, a timestamp from three years ago. My name was in the header. My signature at the bottom.

Cade's voice dropped. "Mara."

"I signed this."

"You didn't know what it was."

"I knew." My throat closed. The design was clean, efficient, brutal.