“—no civilian exposure?—”
“—asset Fierson?—”
“They took her,” I whisper, my blood roaring in my ears loud enough to drown out the server hum.
Rage surges up my spine like napalm, hot and blinding and righteous, the jalshagar responding in kind with a feral, incandescent hunger for extinction-level violence that promisesto erase this feeling from the universe if I just let go far enough to obey it.
Kill.
Annihilate.
Burn it all down.
I am already moving toward the weapons rack before my conscious mind catches up, already halfway into becoming exactly what the Alliance engineered me to be: a walking war crime in boots.
“I will kill every single one of you,” I whisper hoarsely into empty air as I rip a pulse rifle off its mount and slam a magazine into it with enough force to dent the casing.
My vision has gone red at the edges.
My hands are shaking with more than adrenaline.
I reach for a grenade.
My fingers close around cold metal.
And then?—
I feel her again.
Not the fear.
Not the pain.
The other thing.
That thin, stubborn filament of clarity she always drags out of herself when everything is collapsing, the same steel I saw in her eyes across the table from Varek Glimner, the same refusal to collapse into victimhood she showed in the archives room, the same incandescent defiance that makes my chest hurt worse than her terror ever could.
She is still thinking.
Still calculating.
Still fighting.
And suddenly I can see myself from the outside: a Reaper on the edge of a massacre spiral, about to go loud in a civilian cityand turn her rescue into a mass casualty event that would make her death inevitable even if I reached her alive.
The grenade slips out of my fingers and hits the floor with a dull, harmless thunk.
My hands are shaking so hard my vision blurs.
“No,” I rasp, staggering backward from the weapons rack and bracing my palms against the wall as I drop my forehead against cold concrete. “Not like this. Not for her.”
I drag air into my lungs until it hurts.
Then more.
I force my nervous system into lockdown protocols the Alliance burned into me as a child, but this time I’m not using them to suppress mercy.
I’m using them to suppress annihilation.
