Page 74 of The Monster's Daughter
I freeze.Brainstem.
Then I remember.
My father, before the stroke. Before he was just a ghost in his own skin. He had a pacemaker. He used to complain about solar storms. “One big flare,” he’d joke, “and this little bastard’s gonna fry me where I stand.”
Electromagnetic disruption. Short-circuit.
EMP.
I yank the pulse detonator off my belt. Standard-issue, enough to blank a small command center.
Bella sees it and her eyes go wide.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“EMP charge,” I grunt, twisting the dial past the red zone. “Overload the field. Kill the neural relay. Disrupt the fusion.”
She stares at me, dead pale. “That thing’ll nuke every synaptic pathway in your body.”
“Five minutes of blackout,” I say. “Maybe less.”
“And her? What if it... resets her too far?”
I stop. Just for a second.
“If I’m wrong...” My voice breaks in a way it never has before. “She dies.”
Bella’s lips part. Her hand trembles as it lifts to touch my wrist. Then she clenches her jaw, meets my eyes with something feral.
“Do it.”
I nod once. Hard.
“Trust me.”
I slam the detonator into the floor.
There’s no time to think. The light flares like a miniature sun, white and blinding. My skin boils from the inside out. My muscles seize in waves, locking hard, jerking violently. Every implant, every nerve ending—I feel them all go dark, one by one, until even my heart stutters and drops like a stone in water.
The world explodes into silence.
I drop.
So does she.
Bella’s scream is the last thing I hear before my eardrums short.
The cultists convulse, glitching as their communion is severed. Sparks rip through their bodies. One collapses, rigid and foaming with artificial saliva. Another bursts into flame, screaming in garbled code. The leader twitches, sparks flying from his skull, then falls face-first into the floor.
The barrier around Natalie cracks, collapses. Her little body tumbles forward.
Bella crawls to her. Her hands are shaking so violently she fumbles her grip.
“Baby,” she chokes. “Please—please come back to me.”
No response.
Not at first.
