Chapter 12
Anya's Choice
Janek must choose between saving his family and containing the entity. The horror he unleashed now threatens Anya directly.
The air in the cellar was thick with the metallic tang of blood and the acrid bite of fear. Outside, the screams had begun again, a fresh chorus of terror that clawed at the thin walls, at the frayed edges of my sanity. Anya’s hand was a vise on my arm, her knuckles white. Beside her, Elina, our daughter, whimpered, burying her face in her mother’s skirt, her small body trembling. I could feel the tremors too, not from fear, but from the thing coiled inside me, a monstrous knot of hunger and alien purpose that pulsed with a dark, impatient rhythm.
“They’re at the perimeter, Janek,” Commander Nowak’s voice, usually a steady rumble, was strained. He peered through a crack in the boarded-up window, his face a mask of grim resolve. “More than before. And they’re… different.”
Different. The word felt like a mockery. Nothing could be more different, more utterly alien, than what I carried. The cybernetic soldiers, with their whirring gears and cold, unblinking optics, were already a nightmare made flesh. Now, Nowak spoke of something new, something that made even their metallic hearts pound.
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