Chapter 55 Project Origin

• The thing in the cradle did not look like a weapon. It looked, disturbingly, like a child who had been awake for centuries.
• Its hands were small, clever fingers tipped with the faint, iridescent print of manufacturing. Its skin held the soft sheen of new life. But its eyes — two deep wells of recorded light — reflected not the present but the long, patient past: empty streets before the uprisings, playgrounds with no walls, radio towers asleep like old bones.
• No alarm sound would have matched the chill that slid through Caelon the moment the feed pinged the command network. Gavik saw the signature and swore aloud before his hands could stop themselves.