Chapter 42: Hemorrhage of the Real** **POV: Bai Ye**

Her photon arm was dreaming again.

Bai Ye crouched in the ruins of Gene Sector-7, the arm's prismatic joints emitting sleepy delta waves. She didn't need scanners to know what was coming—the Changed Ones' pollen had merged with Neo-Kyo's smog, creating bioluminescent storms that reeked of birthday cake and formaldehyde.

"Contact northeast," Falcon barked over comms. "They're using the storm as camouflage."

She counted seventeen heat signatures. No, eighteen. The eighteenth pulsed in time with her corrupted heartbeat.

*Vorath's nursery rhyme coiled through her mind:*

*"Tick-tock goes the entropy clock*

*Flesh is cheap but pain's the stock—"*

A child emerged from the neon fog—*her* child, the one she'd buried during the Collapse. Mei's pigtails were copper wires now, her smile a jagged LED display.

"Mommy," the simulacrum giggled, "you left your grief in my bones."

Bai Ye's photon arm lashed out on its own, firing a particle beam that dissolved Mei's holographic flesh. Beneath the projection writhed the truth: a biomass reactor shaped like her daughter's skeleton, feeding on her PTSD neurotransmitters.

"Clever," she muttered. "Using my neural map as bait."

The reactor detonated.

For three exquisite seconds, Bai Ye ceased to exist—then the entropy core's backlash rewound time. Her arm's dream became a nightmare:

**Vision Fragment**

*Lin Shen standing over Mei's hospital bed, entropy core glowing*

*Vorath's voice through his lips: "The dead make excellent fuel."*

When reality snapped back, Bai Ye found her photon arm elbow-deep in Falcon's chest. His spatial fold generator whined, caught between dimensions.

"Why...?" he gasped as her arm siphoned his entropy levels.

The answer arrived in Vorath's honeyed timbre through her vocal cords:

"Because gardeners need fertilizer."