The first sensation isn’t pain so much as catastrophic displacement, as if something inside my chest has been wrenched sideways out of its proper alignment and slammed back into place at the wrong angle, sending a violent shockwave up my spine and down through my legs hard enough to buckle my knees out from under me in the middle of the ops room.
I hit the concrete on one knee with a sharp, involuntary sound torn out of my throat, one hand slapping down against the cold floor to keep myself upright as the wall displays smear into meaningless bands of color and motion, Alliance telemetry dissolving into visual noise while the low hum of servers deepens into a distorted roar that feels less like sound and more like pressure inside my skull.
Air leaves my lungs in a broken rush.
Not from impact.
From certainty.
Kimberly is terrified.
The knowledge arrives fully formed, brutal and absolute, injected straight into my nervous system through the bondwith a level of clarity that bypasses reason entirely, and for a disorienting half second I am no longer in the safehouse at all, but suspended inside the raw echo of her fear—sharp, jagged, disoriented, wrapped around a core of incandescent defiance that hurts worse than the terror itself.
“Oh—no,” I gasp, dragging in air that tastes metallic and wrong, my heart hammering so violently against my ribs that I can feel it in my teeth.
My palms are slick with sweat when I force myself upright, every muscle in my body vibrating with adrenaline and something far older and uglier that surges in response to her distress, the jalshagar roaring awake inside my chest like a star going nova, instinct screaming for annihilation with a volume that nearly drowns out coherent thought.
“Kimberly—” Her name tears out of me, hoarse and uncontrolled, as I stagger the last step to the nearest console and slam both hands down on the surface hard enough to rattle the display.
The ops room is suddenly too bright, too loud, too small.
“Locate,” I snarl at the system like it can hear me. “Locate her. Now.”
I jack straight into the terminal, bypassing safety interlocks I installed myself because I knew—on some level I never admitted to consciously—that one day I would do exactly this, and surveillance feeds explode across my vision in a chaotic flood of transit nodes, crowd cams, drone telemetry, and security logs from Node Theta-4 that I scrub backward through time at brutal speed, my implant screaming warning tones as I overload it with raw data throughput.
There.
Feed 17-C.
A half-second glitch where the frame rate drops and two men step out of a crowd that doesn’t move naturally around them.
“Got you,” I whisper, my jaw locking so hard my molars creak.
I isolate the sequence, enhance it twice, and watch her walk toward Lenara and the syndicate rep, shoulders tightening, head tilting a fraction as her instincts light up half a second before the ambush detonates into motion.
Hands grab her arms.
A hood snaps down over her head.
The shock baton cracks into her ribs.
The feed jumps.
A sound tears out of my throat that doesn’t belong to any human language.
“Fuck.”
My hands curl into claws as I track the service corridor panel sliding shut behind them and switch camera layers to maintenance grid overlays and tunnel cams, fully expecting most of them to be dead—and of course they are, because whoever planned this knew exactly what infrastructure layers to kill and which blind spots to route through.
They planned it.
They choreographed it.
I rip Nine chatter off dark comm bands I’ve been ghost-listening to for months, shredding encryption like wet paper as fragmented phrases spill into my auditory feed.
“—package secured?—”
“—route delta confirmed?—”
