Chapter 17 · The Heartbeat Gate

The dead machines did not stay dead.

Eve heard it first beneath the ringing in her ears—a thin metallic pulse, almost too soft to notice beneath the hiss of acid rain and the groans of the flooded maintenance ring.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Cain lay against the curved wall, one hand clamped beneath his ribs. Blood had soaked through his shirt and run in narrow red streams across the grated floor. Behind him, the last of the armored purge soldiers burned in pieces, their weapons warped into black puddles. One mechanical hound twitched beside the floodgate, blue sparks jumping from its exposed spine.

The survivors had gone quiet.

They stood in a ragged cluster beneath the emergency lamps, soaked, shivering, and staring at Eve as if she had become another kind of weapon.

She could still feel the energy under her skin.

Blue light crawled through the veins of her forearms, fading and brightening with every breath. It had poured out of her when the soldiers cornered them. It had torn through armor, shattered rifles, and reduced the hounds to twitching metal. It had answered her anger before she had known how to command it.

Now it answered something else.

Tick.