Chapter 15 - The Severed Cord
The psychic pressure was tearing Isabel apart from the inside. Blood pooled on the stone beneath her chin. Through the red haze of her failing vision, she saw Naira stepping closer, the child's small boots splashing in the chemical sludge.
Behind Naira, the scar at the back of her head had split completely open. It wasn't bleeding red blood. Protruding from the fissure was a thick, braided cable of silver organic fiber, pulsing with violet light, snaking upward into the ceiling’s central broadcast array like an umbilical cord made of living mercury.
*She isn't commanding them,* Isabel realized with terrifying clarity. *The array is driving her. She's just the needle.*
"Naira, listen to my heartbeat," Isabel gasped, dropping the revolver entirely. She leaned forward on her hands and knees, deliberately lowering her defenses, offering her throat to the child. "Remember the storm at the ridge. You were afraid of the thunder, and I told you... the thunder is just the sky clearing its throat."
Naira halted two feet away. Her small chest heaved in violent, jagged spasms. The golden sheen in her eyes flickered, revealing for a fraction of a second the terrified, dark brown eyes of the seven-year-old girl who loved wild honey and hated the smell of kerosene.
"M-Mommy...?" Naira’s real voice broke through the static, fragile and drowned in agony. "It's so... loud. It won't stop talking."
"I know, baby. I'm going to turn it off."
Isabel surged upward. She ignored the agony ripping through her shredded shoulder, lunging past the child's grasping hands. She didn't strike Naira; she grabbed the braided silver umbilical cable connecting the girl’s skull to the ceiling node.
May you like
With all the strength left in her broken body, Isabel slammed her hunting knife across the thick, rubbery fibers.
The cable shrieked like a living animal as the steel severed it. A geyser of blinding white sparks erupted, blowing Isabel backward onto the stone. Naira collapsed like a marionette whose strings had been severed in mid-air, falling limp and motionless into the brine.
