Chapter 66 Out of Time
She was out of time. The world was a loop of alarms, screaming, and blood.
Daisy rammed her clawed thumb against the exposed vein at the center of the extraction conduit. The old skin split without a fight. Dragon scales met Ravensworth iron, and the moment they touched, a jolt of blue fire snapped through every cell in her body.
She almost blacked out. Almost.
The link with Xeris was a lifeline, a brutal clarity that mapped every circuit, every resistor, every chunk of city-spanning agony that flowed through the fortress’s veins. The system tried to siphon her dry, but it was built for mortals, and Daisy had left that behind hours ago.
Her blood flooded the network.
First, she felt every pod and cable. Then, the people inside. Their minds flickered like candlelight, hundreds at once, their pain and terror punching straight through her skull. Daisy gritted her teeth and let them in.
Images slammed her: a mother, locked in mid-sob, cradling the memory of a child already gone; a soldier who’d lasted two days under torture and was still apologizing for breaking; a clerk who’d lied for years to keep his family safe, then been betrayed anyway—faces, names, fragments of stories, all slamming into her with no time to brace.
She could have let them go. She didn’t.
Instead, she took it, let the spiral on her wrist pulse and churn, let the blood-magic in her bones act as a buffer. Her own pain swelled and folded, but she pressed it outward, taking the surge into herself and away from the victims.
Samuel staggered upright behind her. His lips were blue, eyes wide. He watched Daisy as if seeing a monster birth itself out of the skin of a girl he’d once thought a student. Eleanora was slumped, one hand propping her against the wall, the other still clutching the sword, knuckles white.
Daisy didn’t have words. She only had will.
She forced the system to a halt. She felt the pull on her own essence, felt the world try to eat her, and refused. The network buckled. Pods shattered, their glass fronts bursting outward as prisoners tumbled free, lungs sucking air and limbs flailing. The ones closest to the main circuit fell in heaps, but the farther pods released people standing, alert, ready to run.
Mira Stone reeled. She had retreated to the far side of the room, one hand pressed to her face where Daisy’s blood construct had cut a groove through her cheek. She hissed, rage and fear battling for dominance.
“That’s not possible,” Mira croaked. Her voice was doubled, an echo behind the words, as if she spoke from every direction at once.
Daisy smiled, bloody. “You’re not the only one who cheats.”
She wrenched her hand from the conduit. The wound didn’t close. Instead, the blood sprayed out in a lattice, forming a gridwork of floating red sigils that zipped through the chamber. Each one landed on a survivor, flared, and vanished. Daisy felt them: every single soul, their panic and hope, their burning need to keep living.
She let them in, and they let her in. The boundaries dissolved.
Mira lunged, unleashing a wave of mind magic meant to fry Daisy’s brain where she stood. Daisy let it hit her. The pain was enormous, but it was nothing compared to the mass of suffering already inside. She caught the magic, rolled it around, and sent it back: magnified, focused. Mira screamed, dropped to her knees, and for a split second, Daisy saw the Oracle as she’d been: a lonely child, picked apart by the world, reshaped into a tool for other people’s power.
Daisy felt sorry for her. But she didn’t let it slow her hand.
She walked across the chamber, the world reduced to a tunnel of red and black. Her scales were glass now, shining with an inner light, every step leaving molten footprints in the old stone. Xeris’s voice roared in her thoughts: Take her. Take her, or she’ll do it again.
Daisy flicked her wrist, and the blood-whip wrapped around Mira’s leg, yanking her off her feet. She crashed to the ground, rolled, and tried to scramble away, but Daisy followed, relentless.
“This ends now,” Daisy said, voice layered with the weight of a thousand borrowed memories.
Mira tried to fight. She lashed out with another wave, but Daisy was already on her, grabbing her by the throat and pinning her to the floor. Their faces inches apart, Daisy saw the terror, the wild calculation, and a flicker of admiration.
“You could have ruled with me,” Mira whispered.
Daisy shook her head. “I’d rather burn it down.”
She squeezed. The scales on her hand cut into Mira’s neck, not deep enough to kill, but deep enough to claim the blood. Mira’s body went limp. Her eyes rolled back, then forward, desperate for something to cling to.
Daisy let the blood-magic do the work. She didn’t just drain Mira. She absorbed her, the way Xeris had shown her: a perfect, predatory consumption that left nothing behind but a residue of memory and a slight, sad echo of what once was.
She stood. The ex-prisoners were staring at her, some in awe, most in raw animal fear.
Samuel moved to her side. “Daisy?”
She turned. The world had changed. Her eyes saw in new colors now, infrared and ultraviolet, the world mapped in heat and magic. Her tongue flicked out, tasting the air, and she could read every heartbeat in the room.
She blinked, once, twice. The world steadied.
“We need to go,” she said. “Now.”
Eleanora limped over, her dress in tatters, her hair streaked with blood. “Where?”
Daisy pointed, her clawed finger shaking a little. “Inner sanctum. That’s where Ravensworth will be.”
“Is he alive?” Samuel asked.
Daisy nodded, the memory of his presence burning hot on the edge of her senses. “He’s waiting.”
The ex-prisoners moved as a pack now, united by whatever magic Daisy had stitched through their bodies. She led them, the spiral on her arm glowing bright enough to light the path. Every step closer to the sanctum, the air got heavier, the pressure building until it felt like a fist on her windpipe.
At the threshold, Daisy stopped.
There was a presence beyond the door, one she hadn’t felt since the night she’d last seen her mother. A signature in the blood, unmistakable, impossibly strong.
She pressed her hand to the cold iron.
“Mother?” she whispered.
The door opened, and the world changed again.