Chapter 62 - The Synthetic Pulse
The cabin of the cutter seemed to drop another twenty degrees in a single second.
Sarah’s breath hitched in her throat, a sharp, ragged sound that cut through the low hum of the marine engines. She was backed against the bulkhead, her small hands clawing into the damp wool of her coat, her eyes dilated until the irises were almost swallowed by black.
"Clara..." she whispered, her voice trembling violently. "What... what are you?"
I couldn't answer. I couldn't move my fingers.
I looked down at my left wrist. The skin was peeled back like wet parchment, sliced open during our desperate scramble through the rusted floodgates of the Calumet trench. But there was no bright, warm gush of life. No crimson stain soaking through the cuffs of my sweater.
Instead, tucked neatly between two pale, biological tendons, ran a filament thinner than a strand of hair. It burned with a cold, rhythmic violet light, expanding and contracting in time with the thumping in my ears.
*Thump. Thump. Thump.*
Except it wasn't my heart. My heart had stopped the moment the voice came through the speakers.
*"Don't look so horrified, darling,"* the radio hummed again, vibrating with my own cadence, my own subtle intake of air between syllables, yet dipped in the venomous ice of Arthur Sterling’s supreme arrogance. *"A masterpiece does not weep when it discovers the sculptor’s chisel. You were always the finest thing we ever grew."*
"Shut up," I snarled, my voice cracking as I slammed my right fist down onto the control console, smashing the auxiliary dial.
The dial cracked under the impact, plastic snapping, but the voice didn't waver. It wasn't coming from the auxiliary speakers anymore.
It was resonating behind my own teeth.
The realization hit me like a blast of sub-zero lake water. The sound wasn't in the cabin air; it was conducting through the bone of my jaw, vibrating up into the auditory canal from somewhere deep in the base of my skull.
"Nicholas!" Sarah cried out, turning toward the companionway where Nicholas lay strapped to the survival cot, his breathing shallow, his face gray from blood loss. "Nicholas, wake up! Please, wake up!"
Nicholas stirred, a groggy moan escaping his cracked lips. His eyelids fluttered, revealing eyes clouded with fever and the lingering effects of the neural sedative they had pumped into him at the cradle facility.
"Clara...?" he rasped, his voice barely a ghost in the icy cabin. "The frequency... I can hear it..."
"Don't listen to it," I choked out, grabbing a pair of heavy medical shears from the emergency kit mounted to the bulkhead. My hands were shaking so violently the metal blades clattered against each other. "Nicholas, don't look at me. Sarah, look away."
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"What are you doing?!" Sarah screamed.
I clamped the shears in my right hand, positioned the cold steel point directly beneath the violet light in my left wrist, and drove the blade into my own flesh.
