I hit the ground in London and did not get up.
The detonation inside the rift had thrown me back through the tear like trash. Asphalt came up fast. Something in my spine went white. Something in my left leg went quiet. Violet energy guttered around me and died.
Katulu landed beside my head as if he had stepped off a stair.
Up close he did not look like a monster. He looked finished. Gold-black eyes. Armour older than the city. A face that had watched children die and decided the universe owed him replacements.
"You fought well for a borrowed flame," he said. "It will not be enough."
I tried to move. My fingers twitched. That was all.
"Elena—"
"Is occupied," Katulu said. "As we planned."
He did not stay to finish me. That was the insult. I was not the prize. I was the obstacle they had already measured.
Command screamed in my ear. Paris holding. New York collapsing. London evacuation incomplete. Then a new alert, closer, worse.
"Loverman—breach at the secondary lab. Repeat, Voss facility is—"
The line tore into static.
I dragged myself one inch. Then another. Blood filled my mouth. The Clan moved over me and through me like I was already a story they had finished telling.
They left London burning and went where Elena was.
The secret lab had no public name. Dr. Voss had built it under an old industrial lot because the world still liked medals more than truth. Elena had given birth there because it was the only place with the machines that understood her blood.
Katulu tore the roof off it with one hand.
Steel peeled back like paper. Daylight and rift-light poured in together. Alarms shrieked. Glass blew inward.
Dr. Voss stood between the delivery bed and the hole in the ceiling with nothing but a crash cart and the kind of courage that does not care about math.
"You will not touch them," he said.
Katulu looked at him the way a man looks at a locked door he does not intend to use.
"You stole our fire and called it science," Katulu said. "You kept the last viable spark in a woman's body and called it a miracle. Stand aside."
Voss did not stand aside.
The blow was small. It was enough. Voss hit the far wall and did not get up. The machines around him kept beeping as if a man were still there to answer them.
Elena saw it.
She was still on the bed, sheets ruined, our daughter against her chest. Nine months of power and one hour of labour had stripped her down to bone and will. Purple light tried to rise around her hands.
"Don't," she rasped. "Don't you—"
The light came. Then it went out.
Her body had nothing left to give. She reached for the baby anyway. Katulu's soldier was already there.
Elena's fingers brushed the blanket.
Then her eyes rolled and she dropped back against the pillow, unconscious, empty, still breathing.
I was not there to stop it.
I was in a crater in London, listening to the last seconds through a dying comm and a link Voss had left open for me.
I heard the baby cry.
I heard Katulu speak over that cry like it was music he had been owed for centuries.
"She will not die as ours died," he said. "The enemy took every child before the rite. They poisoned the line. This one carries uncorrupted fire. She will reach the age. She will stand among us. That is not theft. That is repair."
Elena could not answer.
I could.
The sound that came out of me did not sound like a word.
They did not wait for me to become a problem again.
On the lab wall, in a language of cuts and circles that no Earth script matched, they left a mark. It burned itself into the plaster in gold-black light and stayed there after the light faded.
Then they were gone.
The rift over the lab pinched shut. The one over London shivered and held, wounded but not dead. The baby's cry cut off as if someone had carried it into another world.
Silence rushed in behind it.
I lay in the street and stared at a sky that no longer had my daughter in it.
Command kept talking. Casualty numbers. Secondary rifts. Requests for orders.
I did not give orders.
I stared at the dark and tried to move my hands until the pain made the world narrow to a single fact.
They had waited.
They had named their leader Katulu.
They had killed the man who delivered our child.
They had taken her.
And they had written their reason on the wall in a tongue I could not read yet.
When I could finally drag one elbow under me, I whispered the only promise I had left.
"I'm coming."
It was not for Katulu.
It was for Elena, still unconscious in a ruined room.
It was for the girl we had named in the dark without saying it loud enough.
It was for the message on the wall, which I would learn if I had to break my mouth on every syllable.
The Immortal Clan had taken our child because they had none left.
That did not make it right.
It only told me what kind of war this was going to be.