Page 52 of Lana Pecherczyk
He launched from his chair, roaring his frustration. Nothing worked. Five years of work and nothing stuck. He struckPandora across the face, snapping her head sideways. Her neck remained at an odd angle, and her shoulder still twitched.
You won’t win.The whisper in his head sounded more like it came from behind him.
“Oh yes, I will.”
No … you won’t.
“I will!”
“She’s right, you know,” a voice said—clearer, present. Real.
Nero turned.
She perched on the windowsill, legs swinging like a child. Not the broken woman who’d fallen to her death, but Aurora, the girl she’d been before she became Rory. Sixteen and untouched by his experiments. Before the crow got its filthy, tainted claws on her.
Her caramel skin glowed against the dull light. Hair free of copper beads and braids, wild and full, framed her innocent face.
“I was never innocent, was I, Dad?” She cocked her head. “Not since you stole me from my mothers. Not since you asked me to spill the world’s secrets.”
“You’re not real.” He waggled his finger at her.
“Then why are you talking to me?” She hopped down from the sill. “Your best assassin, your Reaper, your own daughter.” She stopped before him, studying him with pity. “You drank me dry, didn’t you?”
“I needed your mana.”
For a brief, unnerving moment, her expression morphed into a scream. Pain. Anguish. Feathers were floating around her. The vision dissipated as quickly as it arrived.
“And what did you get instead?” She tapped her temple. “Memories you never wanted. Knowledge you can’t access.” She circled the room, her pale white dress dragging on the dirty ground. She eyed broken items with distaste, pitied the disarray. “Visitations you can’t predict.”
Nero forced his gaze away from the apparition. He brushed Pandora’s hair from her nape and used the screwdriver to peel back the patch of silicone skin. A rivulet of blood oozed down her back, disappearing into Rory’s old Reaper uniform. Her shoulder still twitched, a steady rhythm like clockwork gears skipping teeth.
Tick. Skip. Tick. Skip.
“Remember when you told me the madness would be manageable?” Rory appeared at his elbow. “‘Family mana is safer,’ you said. ‘It won’t drive you to hallucinate,’ you said.”
“Shut up.”
She leaned closer, her breath—impossible, nonexistent breath—warm against his ear. “You were wrong.”
“I didn’t know,” he muttered, focusing on Pandora’s exposed control panel. The latticework of circuits and valves was tech from another era, repurposed and modified with the Tinker’s designs. He pulled down the uniform collar and revealed a panel between her shoulder blades—a mix of living, human bone, and brass. He used his screwdriver to open it and connected the wires and tubes from the neural interface to the battery inside her ribs—a clockwork device of brass fueled by harvested Guardian mana.
“You knew.” Rory ran her fingers along the edge of Pandora’s exposed mechanics. “Look at that. The Tinker’s work. You stole that too.”
“She left it behind.”
“Like I left behind the cryptex’s location? In my memories? The ones you can’t see or even access?”
Nero bit back a response, knowing it only fed the hallucination. The nuclear winter freeze had rusted Pandora’s components far more than he’d expected. He’d gambled on her survival, and it had cost him five years, half their resources, the fragile loyalty of his starving people.
As he waited for her to refuel, he focused on the positive. Pandora had found him a lead. She could pass as human. But their Guardian mana reserves…
“Are almost gone,” Rory whispered, now standing directly behind the still-twitching Pandora. She met his eyes. “Just like me.”
Nero clenched his fists, forcing himself to inventory mechanical components. The neural network seemed intact. The Tinker’s mana distribution node pulsed beneath her left clavicle—the same design he’d seen in those abandoned blueprints. The clockwork heart ticked steadily.
Wait.
He leaned closer, examining the heart’s brass casing. A hairline crack had formed a complex pattern across its surface—the same design inlaid in the Tinker’s weapons. He’d seen that pattern before when he’d examined her notes. It wasn’t a flaw but a deliberate feature.
