Heir In The Shadows

Chapter Sixty-One — “The Echo That Shouldn’t Exist”

The molten chamber roared like a living beast. Every vent screamed, every pipe rattled, every beam trembled under the escalating internal pressure of the reactor.

But Sophia barely heard any of it only the ragged beat of her own pulse, and the faint, impossible echo of another heartbeat underneath it.

Daniel. He was gone. Yet something of him lingered.

Luther dragged her backward as another support beam snapped and plunged into the molten stream below. Heat blasted upward in a violent plume. They shielded their faces as sparks exploded around them.

“We move now!” Luther barked. “This collapse won’t stop until the whole sublevel is swallowed!”

Sophia’s hands shook, but not from fear. From recognition Daniel’s signature, faint but pulsing, scattered across the airwaves like a heartbeat stitched into static.

“He’s here,” she whispered, breath trembling. “In the system in the reactor somewhere.”

Luther didn’t argue. He had seen the impossible enough times with Daniel to know doubt was a l