She found almost nothing. They were too fast, too brutal, too perfectly designed for what they did.
But she kept watching anyway.
She lay awake for hours that night, staring at the ceiling, replaying the footage in her mind. The speed of them. The power. The way they moved like violence was a language they had been born speaking.
She was going to hunt one of those things. Or it was going to hunt her.
The dread sat heavy in her chest, cold and certain. She could die on that island. Could die badly, torn apart by a creature that wouldn't even remember her name a year from now.
But beneath the dread, threaded through it like wire through clay, was more.
Awe.
She had spent her whole life surrounded by ordinary predators. Criminals. Politicians. The petty monsters who wore human faces and destroyed lives with paperwork and policy. She had learned to hate them, to hunt them, to bring them down when the system allowed it.
This was different. This was a predator without pretense. Pure. Honest. Terrible in the old sense of the word—inspiring terror, yes, but also a strange, unwilling respect.
If she was going to face a predator like that, she wanted to be worthy of the fight.
She wasn't sure anymore which possibility frightened her more—dying on that island, or discovering what she might become if she survived.
She called Aria once a week.
Morgan had arranged it—a secure line that couldn't be traced, routed through systems Serafina didn't understand. She sat in her small quarters, the bio-armor resting dormant beneath her clothes, and watched her sister's face appear on the screen.
Aria looked better each time. The bandage was gone from her throat, replaced by a thin scar that would fade with time. Her color was back. Her voice was stronger.
"You look tired," Aria said during the third week.
"Busy." Serafina forced a smile. "The job's demanding."
"You still can't tell me what you're doing?"
"Not yet. Soon, maybe."
Aria studied her through the screen. She'd always been too perceptive for her own good. "Sera... are you okay? Really?"
Serafina thought about the bio-armor bonded to her skin. The alien weapons she fired every day. The footage of Kha'Ruun warriors tearing through enemies like paper.
"I'm okay," she said. "Really. How's Dad?"
They talked for twenty minutes, about Aria's recovery, about Angelo's stubbornness, about the physical therapy appointments and the follow-up scans that all came back clear. Normal things. The kind of things that belonged to Earth, to the life she had put on hold.
When the call ended, Serafina sat in the dark for a long time.
She was doing this for them. That was what mattered.
She kept telling herself that. Some nights, she almost believed it.
Other nights, she wondered if she was doing this because some part of her wanted to know what she was capable of. What she could become, if she stopped holding back.
She didn't like that thought. She didn't push it away, either.
The final test came at the end of the fourth week.
They dropped her in the jungle—real jungle this time, not the training grounds—with her armor active, her veth'kai charged, and a single objective: survive.
The simulation lasted three days.
