His Private Hell - Chapter 27: Chapter 27

The Lazarus core had been removed.
But its imprint remained—in Darcie’s blood, in the way she breathed like her lungs belonged to someone else, in the way silence stretched too long between heartbeats.
“You’re not sleeping,” Eella said, leaning against the doorway.
Darcie didn’t look at her. She was sitting on the windowsill of their shared quarters, watching a storm crawl across the Adriatic.
“I’m not awake either,” Darcie murmured.
“Post-trauma,” Walter said, appearing behind Eella. “Neurological and emotional fragmentation. We need to run tests.”
“I don’t need tests,” Darcie said.
“You bled through your eyes last night,” Eella snapped. “That wasn’t poetic metaphor.”
Darcie turned, sharp. “You think I don’t know what’s happening to me?”
She stood, her skin visibly pulsing beneath the collarbone, like circuitry was stitching itself beneath her veins.
“They changed me. I let them.”
Walter stepped closer. “You pulled the core. You ended it.”
“No,” Darcie whispered. “I just interrupted it.”
A silence fell.
Eella’s jaw tightened. “What do you mean?”
Darcie looked at her.
“I saw it—up there. The architecture of it. The Lazarus sequence isn’t a weapon. It’s a seed. And I just dropped one into myself.”
⸻
Leda was gone by the time they reached the med ward.
No signs of breach.
No camera footage.
No trace.
“She wasn’t taken,” Astrid said, pacing like a lioness. “She walked out.”
“That’s not possible,” Garrison muttered. “She was catatonic.”
“Or pretending,” Eella replied. “Like Darcie did. Like I did. Survivors pretend.”
Valora stood in the corner, stone-faced.
Darcie turned on her.
“You knew something.”
Valora didn’t deny it.
“She activated the uplink herself.”
Eella’s fists clenched. “And you let her?”
Valora’s voice was calm. “She’s not a child. Not anymore. Not after what she carried. The Lazarus genome rewrites age. She was never just human.”
Darcie leaned forward, her skin glowing faintly now, a low hum beneath her breath.
“She’s going to finish what Nyx started.”
⸻
Leda was seen six hours later—on a street camera in Montenegro. Barefoot. Smiling.
And completely surrounded by dead bodies that were still standing.
Walter paled. “Resurrected?”
“No,” Darcie said, voice low. “Repurposed.”
The video ended as Leda turned toward the lens.
Her eyes were silver.
“F***,” Astrid whispered.
Eella looked to Darcie. “What do we do?”
Darcie didn’t hesitate.
“We go get her. And if we can’t bring her back…”
Her voice cracked.
“Then I end it myself.”
⸻
The plan was suicidal.
Break into the subterranean grid beneath the Dinaric Alps—where the Lazarus signal had spiked.
Walter and Astrid hacked the pulse scanners.
Garrison rigged the explosives.
Eella packed the high-grade venom rounds.
And Darcie…
Darcie shaved her head.
Stripped down to skin and steel.
If she was going to die—she wanted no illusions between her and the void.
They descended in silence, the tunnels slick with humidity and ghosts.
Until they saw her.
Leda stood in the center of the corridor.
Eyes glowing. Hands open.
No fear.
No remorse.
Just… welcome.
“I’ve missed you,” she said.
Her voice echoed in every one of their heads.
Darcie raised her weapon.
But Leda didn’t flinch.
“Do you remember what you told me?” she whispered. “That the world would burn before it bent?”
Darcie’s eyes watered. “I didn’t mean for you to believe that.”
“I didn’t believe it,” Leda said. “I became it.”
The walls behind her rippled.
The dead moved.
Animated. Controlled.
“I gave them peace,” Leda said. “I gave them eternity.”
“You gave them nothing,” Eella spat. “You stole their deaths.”
Leda looked at her. “Death is a primitive thing. You still believe in endings. But I see systems now. Loops. Patterned recursion. Rebirth.”
Darcie stepped forward.
Her gun lowered.
And her voice broke.
“Leda, I loved you like a mother does. You were a second chance.”
Leda’s expression shifted.
A flicker.
Pain?
Doubt?
And in that second—
Astrid fired.
The venom round hit Leda in the chest.
She collapsed.
The bodies behind her stilled.
But Darcie screamed.
Not from grief.
From the backlash.
She fell to her knees, her blood turning silver.
The core in her chest activated.
Leda wasn’t the hub anymore.
Darcie was.
⸻
The extraction was chaos.
They dragged Darcie out as the cavern collapsed. The energy discharge from her veins fried the comms. Eella carried her, whispering promises she wasn’t sure she could keep.
Valora met them at the airlift pad.
“I told you she wasn’t stable.”
Eella leveled a gun at her.
“Get out of our way.”
Darcie’s body shook. The silver was overtaking her irises now. Her heartbeat played in binary.
“She needs to be contained,” Valora said. “She is the Lazarus weapon now.”
“Then she’s the one who will end it,” Eella hissed.
They flew under fire.
No safe zones left.
No guarantees.
Just one goal:
Find a way to separate Darcie from the Lazarus core.
Before it rewrote the world through her bones.
⸻
They found an abandoned orbital engineering lab in Greenland—once used for high-altitude terraforming drones.
Now, it was their last hope.
Walter worked for forty hours straight, splicing code and neural inhibitors.
Eella refused to leave Darcie’s side.
Darcie drifted in and out of lucidity.
Sometimes she was herself.
Sometimes she was Nyx.
And sometimes—something in between.
“You still smell like gunpowder and sin,” she whispered one night, reaching for Eella.
“I’m not the one with stars in her blood,” Eella whispered back.
They kissed like drowning things.
Like memories might anchor them.
And for a moment—
The hum in Darcie’s veins stilled.
⸻
It was Astrid who found the fragment key.
A broken piece of the original Lazarus code, buried in an off-grid server deep in the Italian Alps.
It wasn’t a cure.
But it was a mirror.
Something that could reflect the core back onto itself—looping its recursion until it burned out.
The catch?
Someone had to be linked to it during the execution.
And it would kill them.
“I’ll do it,” Darcie said, standing.
Her skin was lit from within. No longer fully human.
“You’ll die,” Walter said.
“I’m already dying.”
Eella shook her head. “There has to be another way.”
“There’s not,” Darcie said softly. “But I’m not doing this to be a hero. I’m doing this because I unleashed her. And because I’d rather go out choosing something than be used by everything.”
She kissed Eella one last time.
Slow.
Searing.
“Don’t wait for me,” she whispered.
“Too late,” Eella said, voice cracking. “I already did.”
⸻
They connected the fragment.
Darcie’s body convulsed.
But she didn’t scream.
She laughed.
Not hers.
Nyx’s.
But then—
She spoke.
One word.
“Erase.”
And the code looped.
The satellite signals died.
The Lazarus bodies fell.
And Darcie collapsed.
Not burning.
Not bleeding.
Just still.
Eella ran to her.
Held her.
And whispered into her ear—
“You’re not allowed to leave me.”
Darcie opened her eyes.
Silver.
But smiling.
“I didn’t.”