All Chapters of The Surrogate’s Blade: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

104 Chapters

Chapter 71 The Knife and the Grindstone

The lead-lined door does not buckle inward the way a door breached by force buckles. It melts.The cold white light eats inward from the edges of the frame, and the meter-thick titanium runs like wax down the jamb, and through the slowly widening gap comes a glare brighter and purer than anything the grey Harvesters carried up the spine, a white so total that it has no visible source and throws no shadow anywhere in the room, the same light I watched eat through the nursery’s magnetic seal a lifetime ago, the light that belongs to the thing that herded me into a dark room and named me Subject Zero.Damian does not check my vitals and he does not ask whether I can stand.He hauls me up off the couch by my unburned arm and pulls me back into the office’s far corner, into the shadow of the open weapons case, putting steel and distance between my body and the melting door.“That is not a cleanup crew,” he says, low and fast, his eyes on the running metal.“That is not even a Harvester squa

Chapter 72 The Siege Begins

I jam it. I do not broadcast the way I did in the medical wing, wide, indiscriminate, thrown at the whole room to wake the cameras and flood the sensors. I do the precise opposite of that.I take the entire silver tide that I have left in me, every scrap the IV bought back, and I aim it, a single coherent spear of my own frequency, straight into the white shape that was built and grown and maintained to drink exactly that frequency, and I overload it the way you blow out a speaker by feeding it a single note louder than it was ever rated to carry.The White-Glow staggers in the breached doorway.Its light stutters, the gathered killing-glare in its palm collapsing back in on itself unfired, and for one half-second, the exact half-second Damian promised me, it stands blind and deaf and reeling in its own element, a god drowning in too much of the one thing it lives on, undone for an instant by an excess of its own diet.But even as it reels, I feel the thing the jam cannot reach. Undern

Chapter 73 Lethal Sovereign

The obsidian blade goes through the grey Harvester’s plate as though the plate is warm wax, and the cut does not slow at the armor the way every law of the physical world says it should, because the engine is at full and full means the blade carries my entire frequency into the steel ahead of the edge, and the steel forgets, for one impossible instant, how to be solid.The Harvester comes apart at the gorget and I am already past it, already turning, already cutting down the second one that drops behind it out of the spine, and the corridor fills with the smell I have spent my whole life learning to scrub and hide and bury, scorched ozone, the burnt-storm reek of a Sovereign at full song, pooling thick and bitter in the dead air around my fists like weather trapped indoors.I do not count them. I used to count everything, exits, cameras, guards, the inches to a man’s carotid.Now I just move, and the moving is enough, and the white shapes and grey shapes the Dir

Chapter 74 The Ticking Bomb

The countdown lives behind my eyes now as a red figure, the Director's five minutes, and every breath I take spends it faster, because every breath feeds the engine and the engine is eating me toward the burn.My pulse is past two hundred and climbing. The cold drain at my center widens with each beat. The scorched tang on my breath thins as the oxygen in my lungs goes to the furnace instead of to my brain.I am the bomb and I am the clock at once. The clock is mine. And it is running down toward a detonation that takes me with it when it goes.Slower, I tell my own lungs, the way my father taught me to tell a racing heart. Spend less. Last longer. They do not listen. They were not built to listen tonight.Damian has me by the arm again, dragging me the last stretch of the spine toward the hangar. He talks fast and low against my ear, the shuttle, the fuel, Julian already aboard and strapped in, Sarah at the controls running the engines

Chapter 75 The Shadow in the Nursery

I do not black out this time.That is the difference, and it is the worse one. I stay awake for all of it, hauled through the burning house on my own buckling legs with Damian's arm a band of iron under both of mine, conscious for every step while the cold eats me from the inside out.He does not stop to revive me and he does not lay me down to work.He keeps me moving, because stopping is dying, and he talks the whole way in the low flat voice he keeps for when the strategist is the only thing holding the man together. The spine is collapsing behind us. The medical wing is gone. The nearest sealed room with power still in its walls is the nursery one floor up.So that is where he half-walks, half-drags me, my heels cutting twin lines through the ash on the corridor floor.I am aware of the lion-headed crib standing empty against the wall. The gutted star-mobile hanging crooked where I left it the day I emptied a listening bug out of one of its poi

Chapter 76 The Ozone Massacre

He drives the needle into me.Not into the empty crib. Not into the air. Into the soft place low beneath my ribs where my own hand is pressing his, past the burning mother and into the gathering child, exactly where I told him the fire had gone.The needle is long, meant to reach deep, and I feel every inch of it go. My belly clenches against the intrusion before my mind can tell it not to, the muscle wall drawing hard as a fist around the steel, and lower, my womb contracts in one long involuntary cramp that doubles me over his arm. Gooseflesh climbs my skin from the puncture outward, the surface going pale and faintly silver where the lattice surges up to meet the breach.Damian's jaw is locked. His hand never slows. I feel the cost of that steadiness travel down his arm into the plunger.Driving forty thousand calories through a pregnant woman's abdominal wall, on her own dying word, is a thing no part of his training ever sanctioned, and he does it an

Chapter 77 The Great Erasure

The Tapper's laughter follows us out of the nursery and down through a house that is busy unmaking itself, and Damian does not once look back at it.His hand is locked hard around my wrist, over the monitor band that still reads the heartbeat under my ribs. Steady now. Strong. The proof that the thing that just saved my life never left my body at all.He moves through the collapsing estate with the settled certainty of a man executing a plan he wrote a long time ago and prayed every day he would never have to use.“Julian,” he says into his comm, not breaking stride, his voice flat and fast over the groan of the failing structure.“Shuttle hot. Sarah on the controls, doors open. We are ninety seconds out through the spine.”A pause as we round a corner where the ceiling has come down in a slope of rubble and the air, for the first time, carries the thick smell of fire under the ozone of my own making.“And initi

Chapter 78 The Vane Protocol

The hangar is the one part of the estate the fire has not yet reached. A cold steel cavern at the far end of the service spine, the shuttle at its center with its doors open and its engines climbing toward a scream and Sarah's face in the cockpit window, her hand raised in a signal that means now.We are forty feet from it. Forty feet from sky, and ocean, and the long flight to my brother.Forty feet.I have crossed worse distances tonight. A corridor full of grey gods. A nursery floor with my own death gathering under my heart. But this is the one that matters, because on the far side of it is the first open air I will have breathed since I walked into Damian Morton's lobby a lifetime and three weeks ago and started counting his exits.The Nutri-Sync is steady in my blood now. The furnace banked and full. The silver running deep and quiet instead of burning at the surface.For the first time all night I am not dying.I am only walking towar

Chapter 79 The Master of the Cage

Damian steps between me and his brother, putting his own body in the line of the sidearm and the needle both. He does not draw a weapon. He does not glance at the tablet. He does not raise his voice.“Give me the tablet, Marcus.”“You do not give me orders anymore.”But the thumb has not pressed. We all hear the thing trembling under his voice. The younger brother, one step behind his whole life, realizing too late that he has stepped in front of the wrong man on the wrong night.“You do not have the Board.”Damian's voice stays flat and low over the roar of the fire.“By the hour's end they will have my report. A Syndicate incursion destroyed the estate. A surrogate-protection protocol failed. Every anomaly in every log, including a catastrophic-trauma nutrition draw consistent with blast injury, is sourced and sealed and signed before you ever reach them.”He takes one slow step into t

Chapter 80 The Sovereign Unbound

The hangar fills with the scrape of stone on steel. Hiss, pause, hiss. Three and two and one. My count. My father's count. The rhythm of the soul I thought no one alive could reach.Damian kneels on the cold floor by the shuttle ramp and sharpens the obsidian blade to it, unhurried, while the estate burns down behind the bulkhead and the engines climb at our backs.He does not stop when I come to stand over him.I have heard that rhythm in only two mouths in my life.My father's hands, in a kitchen, teaching me that an edge is a discipline and not a threat. And my own, every night since, alone, keeping faith with a dead man.Hearing it come off this man's hands closes something in my chest and opens something else, and I do not have a name for either, and I do not reach for one.He finishes the edge, tests it against his thumb, and only then looks up.And he holds it. Back in the burning hangar, with his brother's gun on his chest, he

...

6 7 8 9 10 11

SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP