The self-destruct alarm grated like rusted gears in their ears. Lucas pressed his decaying prosthetic against Ayla's throat, sparks from his spinal port projecting "00:04:23" on the wall. Max crunched licorice loudly, his cane's laser welder melting vent grates—Selene's drones had locked onto the clinic thirty-seven seconds prior.
"Even self-destruction needs a romantic countdown?" Max hurled a modified neural stabilizer at Lucas' disintegrating knee joint. "Next time wire the detonator to my damn coffee mug."
Ayla ignored them. Her chisel split the scar tissue on her clavicle, cerulean blood seeping into the blade's circuitry. Lucas' mechanical pupils contracted to pinpricks, his virus-ravaged voice box rasping warnings: "Reverse protocol will burn 67% of your synapses..."
"Shut up." She plunged the blade deeper, unmodified nerve fibers glowing like bioluminescent tentacles. "Not in your predictive algorithms?"
Max kicked over the medical tray, sending Selene's nano-trackers flying in the shrapnel. Ayla pressed her pulsating nerves against Lucas' severed spinal wires—bioelectric surges made both bodies convulse. She saw his memory of her fifteen-year-old self huddled in lab vents, while real Lucas dug metallic fingers into her back muscles, trying to shove her away.
"Sync overload!" Max's cane sprayed coolant on smoking welds. "You're sharing pain neurons now—including his cardiac detonation..."
At fusion, Ayla tasted cedar and blood from Lucas' memories. Their retinas projected dual images: the clinic's crumbling ceiling, and Odile's implanted false memory—Ayla stabbing a dagger into his mechanical heart during a storm.
"This is real." She bit into Lucas' decaying wrist, cerulean blood soaking their entwined nerves. "That night you left...the gypsum lamp was lit."
As the symbiotic interface completed, Selene's drones shattered bulletproof glass. Ayla dragged Lucas into the vents, their new neural link syncing movements mirror-perfect. Max stayed behind, embedding his prosthetic arm's chip into the welder—its serial number matched "Observer No.13" in Odile's files.
"Freezer truck three blocks down." His voice dissolved in metal sizzling. "Gypsum lamp fragments under the driver's seat..."
Lucas' leaking heart electrified the neural link, converting voltage into Ayla's searing left eye. She traced the raised wolf sigil on her clavicle—identical to Lucas' carvings in the lab. When they crashed into the freezer truck, the rearview showed drones dismembering Max's remains, half a licorice stick still clutched in his hand.
Frigid air bit their lungs. Ayla ripped up the driver's mat—gypsum shards held a microchip with Lucas' biometric key labeled: "Activate upon reverse protocol completion."