She stood behind me with my severed braid in her hand, laughing as I cried—but ten minutes later, my husband walked in with a guest who made her face go white. / Chapter 77 / 91

Chapter 77 - The Cold Forge

My boots dangled six inches above the grated floor. The grip on my trachea was absolute, neither tightening nor loosening, calibrated with mathematical precision to starve my brain of oxygen without crushing my windpipe.

I stared into my own face.

Up close, the illusion shattered. Beneath the translucent, lifelike synthetic skin, tiny fiber-optic relays pulsed beneath the surface like glowing bioluminescent worms. Her pupils were not dilating; they were mechanical irises, constantly adjusting their focal aperture with microscopic clicks.

"Subject 07," the duplicate intoned, her voice vibrating directly into my jawbone through the contact of her fingers. "The field observation is terminated. The emotional latency parameters have been recorded. You experienced love. You experienced betrayal. You experienced grief. The matrix is saturated."

"I... am... human," I choked out, clawing at her wrist. The metal beneath her synthetic skin felt like ice-cold engine iron.

"You are a repository," she corrected softly. "And the vessel requires its ignition sequence."

She raised the carbon-steel shears in her free hand. The heavy blades opened wide, catching the amber light of the consoles.

"No!" Elena’s scream was accompanied by the sound of tearing metal.

From across the room, the matriarch—the woman who had terrorized me, who had mocked my tears, who had sneered as my hair fell to the ballroom carpet—lunged forward. She wasn't running to save me; she was holding a heavy, high-voltage maintenance cable she had torn from the wall console, its copper wires sparking violently with blue electrical fire.

Elena threw herself onto the duplicate's back, jamming the live, sparking cable directly into the exposed junction at the base of the replica's neck.

A blinding explosion of electric blue light engulfed them both.

A deafening, synthetic shriek tore through the duplicate's speakers. Her grip on my throat vanished instantly as thousands of volts surged through her internal circuitry. The force of the discharge threw me backward onto the wet deck.

Elena clung to the machine like a rabid animal, her face contorted in a mask of primal fury. "Run, Clara! Get Nicholas to the ballast control! You cannot reason with it—it’s not a mind, it’s Arthur’s will!"

The duplicate's head snapped around a full one hundred and eighty degrees, facing backward toward Elena with a sickening series of mechanical clicks. Even as smoke billowed from her neck and her synthetic flesh charred to black ash, her arm reached behind her.

The heavy shears drove downward.

Elena gasped. A wet, hollow sound echoed through the chamber as the carbon-steel blade sank deep into her chest.

"Mother!" Nicholas’s groggy voice cut through the ozone-choked air. He was crawling across the deck, blood streaming from his temple, reaching helplessly toward the struggle.

Elena didn't look at him. She looked at me, blood bubbling over her lips, her hands still desperately holding the live cable against the machine's exposed chassis.

"The switch..." Elena choked out, her fingers locking in the death grip of electrical tetany. "The... core isn't... in the ship... Clara... the core is..."