Chapter 34
Chapter
Thirty-Four
JEX
The water is a freezing vice, but the cold isn’t the problem. The problem is the frame rate.
I’m treading water, watching the white tactical cutter glide toward Hallow. One second, it’s a masterpiece of military engineering—sleek, carbon-fibre plating, glowing blue HUD displays on the bridge, the Vance Corporation crest shimmering like a neon star. The next, the image tears.
The blue glow stutters into a flickering, dying yellow lantern. The carbon fibre melts into rusted, jagged iron. The sleek prow becomes the rotting nose of a tugboat called The Mercy, its hull weeping orange streaks of oxidation into the black harbour.
“Ryker,” I choke out, my teeth shattering against each other. “The boat. It’s… it’s shifting. My head, it’s—”
“Focus on the mission, Jex!” Ryker screams, but he isn’t looking at me. He’s staring at the deck of the cutter with a terrifying, wide-eyed intensity. “The retrieval team is deploying. Look at their gear. Thermal goggles. Level four plates. They’re professionals.”
I look. I see them. Six men in bone-white tactical suits, moving with the synchronised grace of a clockwork machine. They raise their rifles, the laser sights cutting through the fog in perfect, lethal red lines.
Then the wind shifts.
The red lasers flicker out, replaced by the swaying, dim beams of two rusted flashlights held by men in stained overalls. The tactical suits dissolve into tattered rain gear. The ‘rifles’ are just lengths of lead pipe and a flare gun.
My stomach rolls. The world feels thin, like wet tissue paper held over a fire.
“Hallow!” I roar, trying to swim toward her, but the water feels like thick, black molasses.
She’s dangling in the air, caught in the grip of the high-tech retrieval arm. But as I watch, the polished chrome of the pincer turns into a frayed, greasy rope sling. She’s being hoisted up like a bag of salt.
“Hallow, look at me!” I yell.
She turns her head. In the ‘clean’ version of the world, she looks like a tragic queen, her hair flowing, her eyes filled with a defiant, cinematic glow. But then the glitch hits. Her face becomes a map of raw, unwashed exhaustion. Her hair is matted with actual filth, not ‘aesthetic’ soot.
She looks at the railing of the boat. Standing there is the Replacement—the girl in the white lace dress.
The girl is perfect. She’s glowing. She’s the sister we should have had. She leans over the rail, her hand extended, her fingers tipped with manicured nails.
“Come home, Hallow,” the Replacement says. Her voice is like a silver bell, clear and sweet.
But then the audio distorts. The silver bell turns into a scratching, rhythmic sound—the sound of a record needle stuck in a groove.
Scritch. Scritch. Scritch. The Replacement’s face blurs.
For a second, she’s not a girl at all. She’s a mannequin draped in a moth-eaten curtain.
Then, she’s a memory of our mother. Then, she’s just a shadow cast by the boat’s crane.
“She’s not real!” I scream, the words tearing my throat. “Ryker, there’s nobody there! It’s the humming! The humming is making us see things!”
“Shut up!” Ryker turns on me, his face a mask of frantic, desperate rage. He lunges through the water, grabbing my hair and shoving my head under.
The world beneath the surface is silent. No humming. No tactical cutters. Just the deep, dark truth of the harbour. I see the pilings of the pier—rotted, barnacle-encrusted wood. I see the trash drifting in the current. I don’t see any “underwater labs.” I don’t see any “submarines.”
I kick Ryker off me and break the surface, gasping.
“It’s a lie, Ryker!” I sob, my voice breaking. “The Council, the Clinic, the Mother… we made it all up so we didn’t have to be alone in the dark! We’re just in the harbour! We’re just—”
“Look at the Ledger!” Ryker screams, holding up the leather folder. “The names! The proof!”
He flips it open to show me. To him, I can see he sees columns of data, signatures, and seals. But I see the truth. The pages are blank. They aren’t even paper; they’re old newspapers from ten years ago, the ink bled into grey smudges by the salt water.
Hallow is lowered onto the deck. The men in overalls grab her.
“Asset 402 secured,” the megaphone on the boat booms.
But it’s not a high-tech broadcast. It’s a man with a battery-operated bullhorn, his voice cracking with nerves.
“Got the girl!” the man yells to someone in the wheelhouse. “Call the cops! Tell ‘em we found the ones from the warehouse!”
Hallow stands up on the rotting deck. She looks at the Replacement, who is flickering in and out of existence like a dying lightbulb. One second, the ghost girl is hugging her; the next, Hallow is standing alone, her arms wrapped around her own shivering body.
She looks down at us in the water. The blue HUD light of the “Cutter” reflects in her eyes, but behind it, I see the reflection of the police sirens on the shore. Red and blue. Red and blue.
“The harvest is a lie, isn’t it?” Hallow asks. Her voice isn’t being projected. It’s just a girl, cold and broken, speaking to the wind.
She reaches for the railing, her fingers brushing the “Replacement’s” hand. Her hand passes right through the white lace, through the ghost’s skin, and grips the cold, rusted iron of the tugboat.
The veil doesn’t just tear. It falls.
The tactical cutters vanish. The helicopters become searchlights from the docks. The “Choir” isn’t an army—it’s just a bunch of terrified kids in masks huddling under the pier.
And Hallow is standing on the deck of a stolen boat, looking at a Zippo lighter she found in the dirt.
“I can still hear the humming, Jex,” she whispers. “Even without the signal. It won’t stop.”
“Hallow, don’t look at the light!” Ryker pleads, but his voice is dying, the delusion finally losing its grip on him. “Hallow, please…”
She flicks the lighter. The flame is steady. Real. It doesn’t flicker. It doesn’t glitch. It’s the only real thing in the harbour.
“I want to see if the fire is real,” she says.
The fire is the only thing that doesn’t glitch.
It doesn’t stutter like the white lace dress or flicker like the HUD displays. It’s a low, hungry orange bloom that starts at the base of a rusted fuel drum and begins to lick its way across the oil-slicked deck of the Mercy.
“Hallow, no!” I scream, my voice cracking into a jagged, raw sob.
I’m clawing at the hull of the tugboat, my fingernails tearing against the rusted rivets, trying to find a purchase, a ladder, anything to get me up there. The water around me is getting warm—a sickening, unnatural heat that tells me the fuel is already spilling over the side.
“Jex, look at the sky!” Ryker is hysterical now, his arms thrashing as he tries to hold onto the ‘Ledger.’
The police searchlights are cutting through the smoke, but to Ryker, they’re still the beams of a corporate invasion. “The Reclamation Team is coming! They’re going to use the fire to cover the extraction! We have to get on the boat! We have to go with her!”
“There is no extraction, Ryker!” I roar, reaching out and grabbing his collar, shaking him until his head snaps back. “Look at the men in the yellow coats! They’re jumping off! They’re running! It’s just a boat, Ryker! It’s just a fucking boat and she’s standing in the middle of it!”
Up on the deck, Hallow is a silhouette of absolute stillness. The “Replacement” is gone—nothing but a memory of lace and lies. Hallow is holding the railing, her hair caught in the updraft of the flames, looking like a saint made of soot.
The humming in my head reaches a screaming pitch. It’s not a lullaby anymore. It’s a siren.
“I can feel the ‘Mother’ now,” Hallow calls down. Her voice is clear, stripped of the static. “She’s not in the clinic, Jex. She’s the heat. She’s the way the light looks when everything finally stops being a secret.”
She takes a step toward the centre of the blaze.
“HALLOW, DON’T!”
I find a rusted rung and haul myself up, my muscles screaming, my bullet-shattered shoulder feeling like it’s being branded. I roll onto the deck, and the smell hits me—not bleach and formaldehyde, but old fish, diesel, and the terrifying, sweet scent of burning hair.
I see her through the wall of orange. She’s standing over the open hatch of the engine room.
“It’s empty, Jex,” she says, pointing down into the dark. “The basement. The clinic. There’s nothing down there but us. There never was.”
I move toward her, but the floorboards groan, the wood charring beneath my boots.
The boat is a tinderbox. Every time I take a step, the world flickers one last time—the high-tech laboratory walls shimmer for a fraction of a second, cold and blue, before being incinerated by the reality of the burning tugboat.
“Come with me,” I plead, reaching my hand through the heat. “We can jump. We can disappear. The Choir—they’re waiting under the pier—”
“The Choir is dead, Jex,” she says, and for a second, her eyes are so old they look ancient. “They were just kids who were lonely enough to believe your stories. They’re gone. And we’re the ones who sent them.”
She looks at the fire, then back at me. She doesn’t look like a prototype. She looks like a girl who has finally finished a very long, very painful book.
“Tell Ryker it’s okay to let go of the paper,” she whispers.
Behind me, I hear Ryker hitting the deck. He’s crawled up the side, the ‘Ledger’ clutched to his chest, his eyes darting around the burning deck as he looks for the soldiers who aren’t there.
“Where is the Mother?” Ryker gasps, his face lit by the inferno. “Where is the extraction team?”
Hallow smiles—a real, devastatingly human smile.
“She’s right here, Ryker,” Hallow says, stepping back into the mouth of the fire.
The fuel drums go.
The explosion isn’t a cinematic blast; it’s a wet, heavy crump that lifts the deck and throws me backward. I hit the railing, the air punched out of my lungs, as a wall of liquid fire cascades over the prow.
“HALLOW!”