The diagnosis was delivered in the sterile silence of the med-bay, a place I had built deep beneath the estate, shielded from any signal, any listening device. The air hummed with the soft whir of filtration systems, a sound I had designed to be calming. Today, it felt like a death rattle.
“Thirty days, Vera,” Dr. Alistair said, his gaze fixed on the datapad in his hands, unable to meet my eyes. “At best. The toxin has cascaded. Your organs are entering a phased shutdown. It’s irreversible.”
I remained still on the examination table, the thin paper crinkling beneath me. I felt nothing. The monster they whispered about, the cold engine that ran the Romano empire’s defenses, had no time for sentiment. “And it remains untraceable?”
He finally looked up, his expression a mixture of awe and
