The machines never slept. They hummed like a pulse that wasn’t hers, mechanical and unrelenting — a substitute heartbeat trapped in the sterile air of the neonatal intensive care unit. Nyssa al Ghul sat motionless beside the incubator, elbows resting on her knees, fingers interlaced so tightly her knuckles had gone white. The clock above the glass walls ticked with military precision, but she had stopped counting hours somewhere between one sunrise and the next.Inside the incubator, Daisy was impossibly small. Too still. Too quiet. Her chest lifted in a fragile, uneven rhythm beneath a tangle of wires and translucent tubing — a symphony of intervention that Nyssa could not command, could not fix, could not fight.She hated the helplessness. The way every instinct in her screamed to do something. To shield. To act. To barter her own breath for the child’s. But there were no enemies to disarm here — only sterile gloves, whispering nurses, and the muted sound of life struggling to stay.“Three days,” one of the nurses had told her gently. “Just until she stabilizes.”Three days. Nyssa had survived assassins, betrayals, wars that reshaped the League itself. But this — this quiet, humming glass box — was the first battle she could not command with discipline or blade.She leaned forward, voice barely a breath against the incubator’s shell. “You have already fought harder than I ever have,” she murmured. “But you are your mother’s child. You will not yield.”Her reflection wavered against the glass — pale, sleepless eyes staring back at a woman she did not recognize. A woman stripped of armor, of certainty, left with only love and terror in equal measure.Nyssa reached out. Her hand hovered, never touching the glass, never daring to disturb the fragile world within. But her voice softened, almost a prayer in languages she hadn’t spoken since childhood.“When you open your eyes, little one… I will be here.”And she would be — as she had been every minute since the monitors began to scream.