Chapter 42
KAGE
Pain. It’s the first thing I register. Not sharp—no, worse.
Dull, marrow-deep, like my whole skeleton is thawing after being flash-frozen.
My limbs are lead bricks, my nerves frayed wires sparking on every breath.
My lungs pull in air that tastes like rust and ozone, and my brain boots slow, piecing reality together like a puzzle missing its center.
I’m lying on metal. Ship-grade. Cheap. We’re airborne. I can feel the humming through my spine.
Bella.
I lurch up, dragging my limbs until I’m on my feet, then stagger toward the main console. The room swims. My vision’s shot to hell—blurry edges, stars at the corners. But the blinking lights on the nav board tell me enough: we’re on autopilot. Coordinates locked. Unknown system. No helm access.
I slam my palm into the override pad. It hisses at me. Locked out.
“Where the fuck are you?” I rasp.
A groan from behind me. My heart free-falls.
Natalie.
I rush to the medbay. She’s lying there, hooked up to every goddamn diagnostic node we’ve got. Her skin’s pale, her veins silver-threaded. Her little chest rises, falls. Too slow. Too shallow.
But she’s alive.
I whisper her name, kneel beside her, press my forehead to hers.
And that’s when I see it—the blinking blue icon above the bed. A message. Personal log. Unlocked only by my biosignature.
I press play.
Bella’s face fills the screen. And it feels like getting stabbed in the throat.
She’s smiling. But it’s wrong. Wobbly. Too wide. Her eyes are glassy. Wet.
“Hey, love,” she says. “If you’re seeing this... I guess I didn’t make it back out.”
I don’t breathe. Can’t.
“I had to do this, Kage. She needed someone on the inside. Someone to fight Nulegion where it’s hiding. And I’m the only one who can. I know what you’re thinking—don’t. Don’t be mad.”
I flinch as she says it. She knows me too well.
“She’s our baby. You saved her once. Now it’s my turn. I love you. More than war, more than peace, more than the stars ever gave me room to say. Tell her... tell her I love her. Tell her I’m sorry.”
The screen fades to black.
The silence afterward is louder than her voice.
I roar. Not a scream. A fucking war cry.
I slam my fists into the console. It cracks, but I don’t stop. I don’t stop until the metal bleeds sparks and my knuckles are slick with black blood. My knees hit the floor and I curl into myself, growling, sobbing.
She’s gone.
She’s inside our daughter.
I don’t even have time to grieve right. Because that’s when I notice the backup file. An encrypted biological trace. Neural architecture. Two signatures—Natalie’s… and Bella’s.
She’s still alive.
Converted. Embedded in the nanite field. Fused with the infection.
She didn’t die. She changed.
I stare at the file until the world narrows. I feel something uncoil in my chest. Something I buried long ago.
I tap the comm port behind my ear.
“Override protocol seventy-nine. Legacy permissions. Grolgath warlink. Open the network.”
A hiss of static. Then the hum.
I’m in.
The digital world hits like lightning. My synapses scream as my perception tears sideways into code-space.
I’m flying. Not through air. Through memory. Through her.
The nanite field is chaos—fractured light and writhing black strands, code woven with emotion, neural echoes pulsing like heartbeats. And then, I see her.
Bella.
Not her body. Her soul. A shimmering form of thought and light, radiant and ragged, battling a coiling mass of darkness that pulses like a heartbeat made of knives.
Nulegion.
It turns as I enter. Sees me. Screeches.
Bella turns too. Her glow stutters.
“Kage?” Her voice is raw, desperate. “You shouldn’t be here—”
“Too fucking bad,” I snarl.
She’s fighting with everything she is. Flashes of her life shimmer around her—Natalie’s laugh, our first kiss, the night she threw a wrench at my head. I see it all. Feel it. It buoys me.
I charge into the fray.
Nulegion hits like a void. A storm of pure logic. It claws into me, tries to rewrite me from the inside. I shove back, bury it under images—Bella in my arms, Natalie in the park, laughter, tears, rage. It hisses, convulses.
Bella grabs my hand. “Together.”
We press forward, memory to memory, hacking into the heart of the shadow.
“You remember the beach on Voltren?” she gasps.
“You made fun of my sunburn for a week.”
“You peeled like an onion.”
We laugh. The shadow flinches.
“That time I got shot and you screamed at the medics—”
“Because you bled like a psycho and flirted mid-triage.”
More laughter. The code around us sizzles.
We keep pushing. Through every shard of who we were. Every time I thought I hated her. Every time I knew I didn’t. Every second we spent apart and ached because of it.
And love.
Love threads through everything.
Love isn’t soft. It’s fire. And we set the void alight.
We reach Nulegion’s core.
I see it now. A black sphere of recursive data, throbbing with stolen memories. Natalie’s fears. Bella’s doubts. My rage.
We link hands.
Then we let go.
And let everything we are burn through it.