The Bloodline Protocol (Part 2)
The voice echoed until it filled the tunnel—Evelyn's cadence running through puddles, through subway tiles, through the broken city like a radio signal on a loop.
"You're playing with inheritance instead of stewardship," she said. "You've made noise, little light—let us teach you how to keep the world from tearing."
Damian's hand tightened in mine until I felt the bones. "Shut her out," he told me. "Don't let her map you."
"How?" I asked. The Core's hum was a throb at my throat now. The Bloodline Protocol message had left a taste in my mouth like metal and old rain. Find the Heart-Key. Break the Chain. Those words were a promise and a riddle.
"By not letting her get the floor," he said. "By staying here—not letting the Core get a foothold in your will. Use me." His voice came out rough. "Use my voice. Use my words. Anchor to human things. Say my name when it wants you to forget."
He watched my face like a man who'd memorize a map to find his way home. The city outside our little sanctum was glad then in a way: a glass of ordinary noise we could swallow for a time. But the reflections—my god, the reflections—moved like memories with their own resentments.
Evelyn's face flooded a mirror of oil-slick water in a drain. "You cannot anchor to him forever," she hissed across the network of reflections. "The Heart-Key is not a toy your line can wield alone. It chooses, or it consumes."
"Then we'll choose it first," I said, more to myself than her. The presence inside me—hungry, patient, newly impatient—snapped like a trap. You want to be queen. Take the throne, it whispered. The temptation tasted like velvet and brimstone.
We left the tram tunnel through a maintenance exit that spat us into a back alley where the skyline looked like a glitching memory. The city's neon died and came back in sections, like a picture stitching itself. People in the distance moved oddly—one step, then freeze, a microloop of the same gesture that made the scene look rehearsed and wrong. A dog barked once, then continued mid-bark for three heartbeats longer than it should have.
Damian kept checking his sleeve, as if the bandage might have sealed itself. He kept thinking he could hide the drain—until finally he didn't.
"You're losing color," I said.
He barked a humorless laugh. "Poetic. I'm bleeding out metaphors." It sounded like a dare to be normal. "We don't have much time."
We went to his car, the black one from his private fleet. He drove like someone running a route of fate, hands steady despite the fatigue. We barely spoke. In the silence I felt the Protocol weaving in me—small sigils opening like eyes along my skin, thirsty. It reached toward the ring at my finger, toward the scar on my palm, toward the little tangled memory that used to be my mother's lullaby.
"Where are we going?" I asked finally.
"To someone who owes me a favor and hates my face," he said. "Old allies. A woman called Marta. She once kept a coffin closed for me. If anyone can find the Heart-Key, it's her." The name had weight. He'd said it like a promise and like a threat.
The city blurred by. Rain streaked the window like punctuated breath. Thoughts sliced through me: images of the Core's veins collapsing, the way the machine had responded when I touched it, the way the ring and the Core pulsed together like two magnets finding alignment. All of it made the Presence inside me purr.
> She is the middle man, child. Break the floor and the world will bend to you.
I pressed my forehead to the glass and watched a reflection that was almost me but not: my mouth pulled in the wrong shape, my eyes darker, a crown like an afterimage. The Protocol coded itself into my vision, mapping symbols across the skyline.
Damian reached over and covered my hand the way someone folds paper—careful, practiced. "Don't," he whispered. "Don't let it show you the whole thing. It's a trick."
"But if I don't see—" I started.
"Then you remain human," he finished for me. "And humans can win."
We reached the safehouse where Marta lived: an antique shop that smelled like cloves and dust and secrets. Marta was shorter than the picture I'd formed in my head and twice as sharp. She had once been a diplomat of old pacts; now she was a relic broker with a pistol and a habit of making tea strong enough to wake the dead.
"Jesus, Damian," she said when she opened the door. Her breath clouded in the air. "You look like hell. And you smell like it." She peeked past him and assessed me with a dealer's eye. "You too. You're glowing."
"Tell me about the Heart-Key," Damian said without preamble.
Marta's eyes flicked to mine, then back to his. "It's a myth," she said. "A story to frighten apprentices. A keyless key, a ritual more than an artifact. But myths are rarely wholly false. They're often a cluster of truths dressed as fiction."
She poured tea that steamed like incense and folded her hands, as if about to tell a sermon. "The Heart-Key is a name for a set of practices. A hidden protocol. Blood signatures. Names that need to be spoken in sequence. You don't find it like a thing on a shelf. You complete it. You become its vessel and therefore its breaker."
I felt the Core in me react, a low chord of interest. The protocol's code ticked in my skin. Find the Heart-Key. Break the Chain. Become the vessel. Become the breaker. It sounded like an execution disguised as salvation.
"How do we do that?" Damian asked.
Marta tapped her teacup twice. "You'll need three things. One: a ledger—your mother's ledger, if it exists. Two: a name that has been hidden—something that ties your line to the anchors. Three: a choice. The protocol requires a sacrifice, an offering to reweave the thread."
"You mean—" Damian started.
"You know what I mean," Marta said. "Someone has to sever. Someone has to take the blow so the rest can live."
The Presence in me smirked. Perfect, it crooned. A choice. A sacrifice. Music to a dynasty's ears.
I felt sick with the word sacrifice. My mother's letter flickered in my head—don't trust the man who saves you. Was that how she saw it? A bargain that indented skin? Had she planned for this, left breadcrumbs so the child could choose differently?
"Where is the ledger?" I asked. "If my mother left something—if she hid it anywhere—tell me where."
Marta's fingers thudded on the table. "She hid things in safe spaces. She left signatures in grocery receipts, in old library cards, in the rhythm of her life. But there was one place she trusted more than others—the undercroft of St. Augustine's. An altar for lost things. It's where she put the ledger the night she disappeared."
St. Augustine's. The church where I'd once gone as a child to get warmth and forget about overdue bills. A place where my mother sang off-key to herself. My throat closed around the memory.
"We go tonight?" I asked. The Protocol's lines pulsed along my veins like a second pulse.
"Yes," Damian said. "We go tonight." His jaw clenched. "We don't have the luxury of daylight."
He turned his head and looked at me like a man weighing a life. "Promise me you won't let it take you away from me." The words were simple and naked and terrifying.
"I promise," I said, but inside I felt all the loopholes. I felt the Presence grinning like a clock.
We left Marta's with a plan thin as a thread and a map full of holes. The rain had turned brittle, like glass being shaved into powder. We moved like burglars in our own city, tracing steps past familiar corners that had become foreign. St. Augustine's was there—its stone face softened by the rain, its doors yawning like a throat.
Inside, candles still burned in odd places. Someone had left prayer notes pinned to the lectern. The altar smelled faintly of my mother's perfume, old and comforting and wrong all at once.
We found the undercroft by descending a narrow spiral staircase. The air grew colder; the light thinner. At the bottom sat a small chest, iron-banded and surprisingly heavy. The lock had been opened once recently, not long after the Core went silent.
With trembling fingers I lifted the lid.
Inside, folded like a small, desperate animal, lay a ledger bound in cracked leather. On the cover someone had written in a hand I knew like the curves of an old song: E. Blake.
My hands shook as I opened it. The pages smelled of iron and ink. Names were listed—dates, addresses, small notations in a shorthand I didn't understand. Then, at the center of the ledger, a page folded in the way letters fold when they want to hide. I opened it with care.
There, written in my mother's hand, was a single line and beneath it a string of sigils that matched the pattern now burning along my veins.
If they come for the bloodline, give them a choice. Take the Heart-Key and end the ledger. Or let the ledger write itself into the city.
My heart hitched. Under the line was a notation—coordinates. They were to a place beneath the city I didn't want to think about: the old waterworks, a place of rust and slow rivers, a forgotten plumbing of the metropolis.
Someone had mapped escape and execution at once.
Damian looked at the ledger, then at me, then at the sigils crawling along my arm. "We end it," he said simply. "We go to the waterworks. We finish this."
I closed the book and felt it reverberate in my chest like a second heart. The Presence inside me shuddered in anticipation, like an animal sensing the hunt.
Outside, the rain eased. The city was a thinning mirror. Evelyn's voice had not returned, but the reflection in a puddle near the church door still showed my smile—wrong, patient, waiting.
We left St. Augustine's with the ledger and the knowledge that the Protocol had been my mother's last mercy or her last deception. Either way, there was a cost.
Damian wrapped his arm around my waist as we moved, a tether in a world losing its edges. His breath was close to my ear.
"If this costs you everything," he said, voice raw, "I will not let it be for nothing."
For a moment, everything else fell away: the city glitching, the Presence purring, the ledger's pages, Evelyn's threats. There was only the heat of him, the steadiness of his hand on mine, and a promise that felt like a rope thrown across a canyon.
I smiled, though the thought of any future where his teeth were still bared in laughter and not in pain felt precarious.
"Then we finish," I said. "We finish tonight."
Above us, a streetlight flickered and then steadied. Somewhere, a camera clicked. The city held its breath—and then, as if in answer, every puddle in the street shimmered in unison.
> Choose, the Presence purred. Choose beautifully.