Chapter Nine: Cry Reconfiguration

When the baby let out her first cry, billboards in Times Square collectively bloomed with cornflowers. The sound waves traveled through the steel cables of the Brooklyn Bridge, reverting mutated rats back into suited office workers. Leila looked down at her daughter with sapphire eyes and saw that her tears were repairing Leila's shattered chromosomes.

"She needs this," Spider Shadow cut his wrist, and his mechanical blood coagulated into a bottle, forming a gene gel. "My Y chromosome can balance..." He suddenly froze, his skin rapidly aging to an eighty-year-old appearance.

Grey gently touched the baby's swaddle with his claws, his scales peeling away to reveal a youthful face. As he hummed a French lullaby, abandoned taxis on the roadside began to bloom and bear fruit. Leila suddenly understood the binary code in her daughter's babbling—it was Aidan's final memory backup.

"Stop!" The glare from an FBI agent's sniper scope hurt the baby's eyes, causing all the glass facades on the street to shatter. Leila used breast milk to draw an antibody formula on the windshield, droplets flying into the air to form a protective shield.

The baby suddenly reached out for the moon, and all electronic screens in Manhattan simultaneously played the wedding video. In the data stream of the full moon, Leila saw the truth: her daughter was a time capsule created from frozen eggs she and Aidan had stored twenty years ago, while Spider Shadow was a failed product of a temporal anchor.

As SHIELD helicopters plummeted towards the Hudson River, the baby's laughter awakened the sunken remains of the Titanic. The rusted hull broke through the water, and on the deck stood three hundred women who looked exactly like Leila, each cradling a glowing infant.