Chapter 28 · The Dead Start Talking

The dead don't whisper. They scream.

Every screen in the facility lit up white, then filled with faces. Thousands of them. Eyes open. Mouths moving in perfect sync. "Theo," they said again, all of them, the sound layered and wrong. "Theo Vale."

Elara's brother.

Nora didn't give a shit about Elara's brother right now. She shoved past Kane, boots skidding on the slick floor, and ran straight for the place where her mother had been swallowed by light. The beam was fracturing. Chunks of it peeling away like burning paper.

"Nora, wait—" Kane's voice came from behind her, hoarse and stretched thin.

She didn't wait.

The white light was dimming. Collapsing inward. And there, in the center of it, Mara Quinn was on her knees, head down, hands pressed flat to the floor. Alive.

Nora hit the edge of the light and it burned. Not heat. Worse. It felt like her skin was trying to remember being someone else. She gritted her teeth and pushed through.

"Mom."

Mara's head snapped up.

Her eyes were clear. No white glow. No overlay of Silas's smug face or the city's cold grid. Just her mother, staring at her like she'd seen a ghost.