“I checked before we came in.” I can’t help the small pride that flats the words. Even on a domestic call, surveillance is knowledge. Knowledge is survival.
She swears, soft and ugly, then scrabbles to her feet. Pain flares across her face, new and immediate, but she punches the adrenaline button and moves.
We hit the corridor in a motion that’s closer to choreography than panic. I pull her into the shadows and press my back to hers, feeling heartbeat, feeling fear, feeling that small human tremor I have never been allowed to soothe. My scaled shoulder is a wall. My arms are the gate.
The hallway outside is chaos. Neon emergency strobes paint the plaster in obscene colors. Residents cry. A dog yelps. Someone is screaming for an elevator. A family huddles in a doorway, faces pale like ripe fruit.
I don’t care about any of it beyond the path I need to take. Hunters are looking for the bright and known. They won’t expect a Vakutan to be the thing protecting a soft human anchor.
We move like shadows. The maintenance ladder yaws open under my boot, and the smell of oil and cold metal rises up like a promise. I kick down and wait for her.
“Val—” she breathes.
“Quiet,” I snap.
She laughs, sharp and absurd, then goes. Two stories of ladder, metal biting into my palms. My arms burn, muscles singing in a way only hard work knows. We come out into a service corridor that reeks of fried circuitry and cheap heating gel. The loading bay is thankfully, blessedly, empty—no trucks, no loaders, nothing but the hum of the systems and a damp patch where someone spilled coolant.
There’s a skiff parked low and dirty, license plate flickering. Someone left it. Good.
I yank a panel open and rip a circuit with bare hands. Sparks hiss like angry wasps. Valtron the warrior is filthy and competent. I start the old craft with a grunt and a prayer. The engine coughs and comes alive like a sleeping beast.
“Go!” I hiss.
She clambers in, limping, cheeks wet with sweat and small, private tears. I smack the throttle.
We clear the alley at a speed that would make a fuel hawk nod in approval. The streetlights blur into lines. We don’t stop until smoke is a thin smear on the horizon and the building is a red dot shrinking behind us.
Only after we put literal miles between us does the adrenaline leak out of my body like steam. I drive with hands that need no steering—instinct and training and a map etched in the parts of me I don’t have to think about.
Rhea’s breathing slows in the passenger seat. She presses a rag to her thigh and curses under her breath every thirty seconds. I study her, watch her like an animal in recovery, and try to count other things: tire heat, engine temp, the sound of thestreet. I catalog everything. The hunter patterns. The drop-ship approach vector. The way Helios chose to send a signal through an entertainment channel.
“You were right to go after the packet,” I say finally. The words are soft. “If Argus wanted the truth spread, he would seed it in noise. He relied on the idea that the system would swallow it and that the corrupt would not notice.”
She snorts. “Or that an idiot anchor would have curiosity enough to poke at it.”
“Maybe you’re not an idiot,” I propose.
She throws me a look that’s equal parts murder and flirtation. “Flatterer.”
I smile, because some muscles still remember a gentler life.
“We need a decryptor,” I say. “There’s a contact who owes me. A small team—off-grid, cheap, fast. We go to them. They break the layers. We get the header. We take it to Dowron.”
“And if they’re compromised?” she asks now, pragmatic, journalist again.
“Then we burn the relay straight to the surface and force a fight they cannot control.” It’s not ideal. It’s not pretty. But it is an option. “But if we go now, we might keep the circle small enough to protect key nodes.”
She considers that. Then she frowns. “What about Kiera?”
“Kiera?” I repeat.
“She lives two blocks from here. She’s the one I keep my backups with. If she’s dead, those drives are gone. I can’t leave without double-checking.”
I want to say no. I want to say the only two options are leave or die. The truth is the same—except leaving without checking on the friend feels like a wound that will never heal in the place in my chest that still remembers her shoulders under my hands. My life, I learned, is not built for sacrifices of the clean sort.
“Twenty minutes,” I say. “We go together. A quick in, check sightlines, confirm the drives, and get out.”
She stares at me so long I think she intends to memorize the lines of my face. There’s a decision in those eyes: trust the man who walked back into her life with more questions than apologies, or make the kind of moral choice that costs people more slowly and more painfully than bullets.
