Chapter 32
Chapter
Thirty-Two
HALLOW
The silence in the ballroom is more violent than the screaming ever was.
It’s a thick, suffocating blanket of ozone and cooling iron.
I’m sitting on the velvet-covered piano bench, my fingers frozen over the keys, stained so deeply with the Magistrate’s blood that it’s starting to dry and crack in the creases of my knuckles.
I look at the High Priestess’s body. She looks small. Replaced. Like a prop from a play that finally ended. A drop of blood from the Magistrate’s swinging heels hits the C-sharp key with a wet tink.
“Hallow. Get up.”
Ryker’s voice is a low vibration near my ear.
He’s standing over me, the ‘Record of Sales’ tucked under his arm like a holy relic.
He doesn’t look like a saviour. He looks like the reaper who stayed for the afterparty.
He reaches down and grips my shoulder, his fingers digging into the raw skin where the Magistrate’s blade bit in.
“We’re moving,” he says. “The Choir is securing the perimeter, but this house is a corpse. We need to get to the vault before the fire reaches the structural supports.”
I stand up, my legs feeling like they belong to someone else—someone who died an hour ago.
Jex is at the double doors, his back to us, his rifle levelled at the hallway.
He’s breathing hard, his shoulders rising and falling in a rhythmic, jagged motion.
He looks like he wants to kill the air itself.
“The vault is behind the library,” Jex growls, not turning around. “The Governor’s private line is still active. I can hear it ringing through the walls. Someone is calling him.”
“Let it ring,” Ryker snaps.
We move through the mansion like shadows in a furnace. The heat from the lower floors is rising, a shimmering wall of distorted air that makes the gold-framed mirrors look like they’re melting. We reach the library—a tomb of leather-bound books and stolen history.
Ryker walks straight to the massive oak desk.
He doesn’t look for a key. He raises his boot and shatters the side panel, reaching in to pull a hidden lever.
The bookshelf behind him groans, a heavy, mechanical sound that belongs in a nightmare, and slides back to reveal a sterile, white-lit hallway.
It doesn’t smell like the mansion. It smells like the Clinic.
Bleach. Formaldehyde. The sharp, stinging scent of medical-grade terror.
I stop at the threshold, my breath hitching in a way that makes my ribs ache. “No,” I whisper. “Not down there.”
Jex turns, his eyes softening for a fraction of a second before the steel returns. He walks over and grabs my hand, his palm rough and slick with sweat. “You aren’t going in as a patient, Hallow. You’re going in as the owner. I’m right here.”
We walk down the white hallway, our blood-stained boots leaving a trail of filth on the pristine tiles.
At the end is a single steel door with a digital keypad.
Ryker doesn’t even hesitate—he uses the Magistrate’s severed thumb, pulled from his pocket like a loose coin, and presses it to the scanner.
The door chirps. Access Granted.
The room inside isn’t a vault for money. It’s a server farm. Rows of black towers humming with a low, electric hive-mind energy. But in the centre of the room, on a glass pedestal, sits a single, ancient-looking leather folder.
Ryker picks it up. He flips it open, his eyes scanning the pages. I watch his face—the way his jaw tightens, the way the colour drains from his lips until he looks like a marble statue.
“Ryker?” Jex asks, his hand tightening on his rifle. “What is it? More names?”
“No,” Ryker says, his voice a ghost of a sound. He turns the folder toward us.
It’s a birth certificate. Three of them.
But they aren’t ours. Not exactly. They’re dated twenty years before we were born. And at the bottom, in the signature line for the ‘Chief Medical Officer,’ is a name that makes the world tilt on its axis.
Dr. Hallow Maddix.
“Mother,” I whisper, the word tasting like ash in my mouth. “But she died. Dad said she died during the ‘complications’ with my birth.”
“She didn’t die,” Ryker says, his voice trembling with a cold, murderous realisation. He flips to the next page—a blueprint. It isn’t for Oakhaven. It’s a map of a dozen facilities across the globe. Paris. Tokyo. New York. “She didn’t die, Hallow. She promoted herself.”
Underneath the map is a recent photograph. It’s a woman standing in a high-tech lab, her hair a sharp, silver bob, her eyes the exact same icy blue as Ryker’s. She’s looking at a monitor, and on that monitor is a live feed.
It’s a feed of this room. Right now.
A speaker in the ceiling crackles to life, a sharp, burst of static that makes Jex spin around, his weapon raised.
“Hello, children,” a voice says. It’s smooth, melodic, and completely devoid of warmth—the sound of a mother who tucks you in with a scalpel. “I must say, the ballroom was a bit much, but the aesthetics were undeniable. You’ve always had your father’s flair for the dramatic.”
I sink to my knees, the white floor feeling like ice against my skin. “Mother?”
“Don’t call me that, Hallow,” the voice purrs. “You’re a prototype. And prototypes don’t get to address the Creator so familiarly. Jex, Ryker… thank you for bringing her home. The harvest is scheduled for dawn. Don’t be late.”
The monitors in the room suddenly flicker to life, showing the harbour. The black helicopters I saw in my nightmares aren’t coming to save the city. They’re coming for us.
And on the screen, a red light begins to blink on a schematic of Hallow’s brain.
Signal Active.
Ryker looks at the screen, then at me, his eyes wide with a devastating, silent horror. “Hallow… what did they put in you?”
Ryker’s fingers are white where they grip the edges of the leather folder, the paper crinkling under the sheer force of his tremor. He isn’t looking at the blueprints anymore. He’s staring at the monitor, at the pulsing crimson dot superimposed over the skeletal wireframe of my skull.
It’s rhythmic. A heartbeat of light. Thump. Thump. Thump.
“It’s in the sub-occipital nerve cluster,” Ryker whispers, his voice sounding like it’s being dragged over broken glass.
He reaches out, his hand hovering inches from the back of my head, not daring to touch me.
“The surgery… the one they said was to ‘fix the damage’ after the first auction. They didn’t fix anything.
They wired you, Hallow. You’re a biological transmitter. ”
Jex makes a sound—a low, animalistic growl that vibrates in his chest. He stalks toward the server racks, his rifle swinging wildly as he looks for something, anything, to destroy.
“You’re saying she’s been calling them? This whole time?
Every time we touched her, every time we moved her…
she was screaming our coordinates to that woman? ”
“She didn’t know, Jex!” Ryker roars, spinning around. The desperation in his eyes is a jagged thing, cutting through the cold mask he usually wears. “Look at her! Does she look like she’s in on the joke?”
I can’t breathe. The air in the vault has turned to lead.
I reach up, my fingers trembling as they find the small, jagged scar at the base of my hairline.
I’ve felt it a thousand times—a small, hard knot I thought was just a reminder of a bad night.
Now, it feels like a parasite. It feels like a hot needle driven into my soul.
“Is she watching me now?” I whisper, my voice barely audible over the hum of the cooling fans. “Through my eyes? Is she feeling my heart break?”
The speaker crackles again. That voice—smooth, cultured, and utterly predatory—returns with a soft, patronising chuckle.
“Don’t be so dramatic, Hallow,” Mother says.
I can hear the smile in her words, the kind of smile that accompanies a lethal injection.
“The visual feed is offline for now. The bandwidth is being used for the bio-metric sync. I’m currently watching your cortisol levels spike.
You’re terrified, darling. It’s making the data very… vibrant.”
Jex slams the butt of his rifle into a server tower, the plastic shattering, sparks showering his boots. “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!”
“Jex, stop!” Ryker grabs his arm, hauling him back. “If you kill the local server, the uplink might default to an emergency burst. It could trigger a seizure. We don’t know what the failsafes are.”
Ryker turns back to me, his face a mask of calculated agony. He kneels, forcing me to look at him. His eyes are searching mine, looking for the girl he loves behind the ‘prototype’ my mother created.
“The helicopters,” I choke out, the sound of the rotors now a physical pressure against my eardrums. “They’re for me. Just for me.”
“They’re for all of us,” Ryker says, though I can see the lie in the way his gaze flickers.
“We’re leaving. Now. Jex, grab the drives.
We burn this room, we burn the library, and we take the coal chutes to the sea wall.
The Choir is holding the North Pier—if we can get to the fast-boats, we can get out of the signal range. ”
“And if we can’t?” Jex asks, his voice dropping to a deadly, flat tone. He looks at me, and for the first time, there’s a flicker of something terrifying in his eyes. It’s not hate. It’s the look of a man wondering if he has to kill the thing he loves to save it from a fate worse than death.
“Then we fight until there’s nothing left to bleed,” Ryker snaps.
He hauls me to my feet. I’m light, hollow, a shell of a person containing a diamond-hard secret. As we turn to run, the monitors in the room change.
The live feed of the ballroom is gone. In its place is a countdown.
04:59
“She’s purging the site,” Ryker gasps, grabbing my waist and shoving me toward the door. “She’s not coming to fetch us. She’s coming to sweep the ashes. Move!”
We bolt into the white hallway, the sterile lights overhead beginning to strobe in a frantic, blinding red. Behind us, the vault doors begin to hiss shut, sealing the truth away in a tomb of fire.
My head throbs, the scar at my neck beginning to burn with a white-hot, electric intensity. She wasn’t just tracking me anymore.
She was reaching out.
The strobe lights in the hallway are a rhythmic assault, turning every movement into a series of jagged, disconnected frames. Red. White. Red. My vision is fracturing, the electric burn at the base of my skull intensifying until I can taste copper on the back of my tongue.
“Hallow, stay with me!” Ryker’s voice sounds like it’s coming from the bottom of a deep well.
He has his arm hooked firmly under mine, practically dragging me as my knees buckle.
Every time the red light flashes, the pressure in my head spikes, a physical weight pushing against the inside of my eyes.
It’s not just a signal. It’s a tether. I can feel the invisible thread stretching across the miles, pulling, winding around my spine.
Jex is a shadow ahead of us, clearing the hallway with a brutal, frantic energy. He kicks open the heavy fire doors leading to the library’s basement level, his rifle lead-heavy in his grip. The smell of smoke is thicker here, swirling in grey ribbons under the emergency lights.
“The chute is at the end of the hall!” Jex bellows over the rising roar of the countdown and the helicopters above. “Ryker, she’s fading! Look at her eyes!”
Ryker stops, slamming me against the cold cinderblock wall. He grabs my face, his thumbs prying my eyelids open. My pupils are fixed, pinpricks of black in a sea of blown-out blue.
“The signal is overloading her,” Ryker hisses, his own face pale and slick with sweat. He looks back at the vault door we just left. “Mother isn’t just tracking her—she’s trying to jump-start the neural link. She’s trying to take control of the motor functions.”
“I… I can hear her,” I whisper, the words barely making it past my lips. My jaw feels stiff, like the muscles are being wired shut by an outside force. “She’s… she’s humming, Ryker. In my head. She’s humming that song.”
The lullaby.
The sound of it is a cold needle stitching through my brain. It’s louder than the sirens. Louder than the heartbeat of the city dying outside.
“She’s not getting you back,” Jex growls, stepping close.
He reaches out, his hand trembling as he brushes a stray, blood-matted hair from my forehead.
The violence in him has shifted—it’s no longer directed at the Council.
It’s a desperate, cornered-animal rage directed at the sky.
“I’ll burn the whole world to ash before I let her put you back in a cage. ”
He leans in, pressing his forehead against mine. The heat of him is the only thing keeping me anchored to the floor. “You hear me, Hallow? Fight it. Don’t listen to the song. Listen to me.”
A massive explosion rocks the foundation. The floor tilts, and the sound of masonry groaning above us tells me the library is starting to collapse. The countdown is a digital ghost screaming in the distance.
02:14
“We have to drop,” Ryker says, his voice regaining that terrifying, clinical edge. He grabs my hand, his grip crushing. “Hallow, if you can’t walk, I’m going to carry you. But you cannot let her in. Do you understand? Shut the door in your mind and bolt it.”
I try to nod, but my neck feels like it’s made of lead. I can feel my fingers twitching—a rhythmic, repetitive motion I’m not commanding. My hand is trying to reach for the knife at my waist. My own body is turning into a stranger.
“Go!” I gasp, pushing off the wall with a burst of panicked strength. “Before I… before she makes me…”
We scramble toward the coal chute, a yawning black maw in the floor that leads into the lightless tunnels beneath the estate.
Jex goes first, disappearing into the dark with a heavy thud.
Ryker lifts me, his eyes locking onto mine for one last, desperate second—a silent promise that he’ll kill me before he lets me become a puppet.
Then, he drops me into the abyss.
As I slide down the cold, metal neck of the chute, the humming in my head reaches a deafening crescendo. And then, a whisper, as clear as if she were sliding down right beside me:
“That’s it, darling. Fall into the dark. I’m waiting at the bottom.”