The hand was cold.
Not corpse-cold. Tank-cold. The kind of cold that lives in formaldehyde and dark red fluid and ten years of never seeing sun. Six fingers, not five, each tipped with a small silver claw that caught the light from the broken window and threw it back white. It closed around Elara's ankle, above the borrowed sweatpants, skin to skin. Where it touched, silver burned.
Elara didn't scream. Couldn't get air.
Lyra did. In her arms, eyes solid white again, small body arching, the mark on her chest flaring so bright it lit the crack in the floor from underneath, bleeding light up through the boards.
"Mama, other me is coming!" Her voice layered child's terror over a woman's exhaustion, the same way Maeve's had sounded in the tank.
Kieran moved before Elara could even look do
