Outside, something detonates.
The building shudders.
I don’t flinch.
There is no clean ending left to hope for.
Only the one we fight our way into.
CHAPTER 30
TUR
Imove through the tunnels beneath the restaurant like a ghost made of teeth and memory. The scent of ash and damp wiring coats my lungs, metallic and thick, clinging like regret. My boots leave prints in the soot and powdered tile where the main dining hall used to be. No one’s come down here since the first fire, maybe longer. Kimberly thinks the safehouse in the north wing is our fallback.
She doesn’t know about the chamber beneath it.
The node chamber.
I don’t want her to know.
The world above is bleeding, gutted and smoking and begging for mercy we know isn’t coming. The Nine have coiled around Fierson like a parasite’s last squeeze, and the Alliance is playing diplomat to ghosts while their ships draw lazy orbiting circles overhead. Stabilization, they call it.
I call it a kill box.
This place—the ruins of the old restaurant, the node hidden underneath, the Reaper-built infrastructure humming beneath the concrete—this is our last stand. No one but me remembers how it was built. No one but me remembers how to crack it open and bleed it out if we need to.
So I do what needs doing.
I bypass the biometric safeties with my own claws. Crack old codes etched into my blood back when the Alliance still whispered Reaper numbers like prayers. The corridor lights flicker to life with a sickly green buzz, and I make my way down into the throat of the beast. The air down here is too cold. Still. Stale with disuse.
I start with the old traps. Deadman lines and pulse feedback triggers and adaptive mine networks no sane modern combatant would even try to touch. I rig the access points to detonate inward if tripped. If someone gets through… they won’t be whole when they do.
The node itself pulses in the dark. It isn’t a machine so much as a wound in the fabric of the planet, pulsing with power that doesn’t belong in this world or any other. We were supposed to control it. Contain it.
No one ever did.
I kneel beside the central console. The surface is still etched with the old glyphs. My name is buried in them. One of the original integration codes. My fingertips brush the pattern, and the system responds like it remembers me.
“Turon Viis,” it whispers in the old Reaper tongue. “Access accepted.”
Gods, I hate that voice.
I pull out the portable transmitter from my pack, snap the casing open, and slot the drive with shaking hands. This isn’t standard ops gear. This is what we call legacy black—hardware that never made it into the official reports, the kind of thing you bury in vaults and swear never existed.
I hit record.
“This is Turon Viis. ID Zeta-417, Reaper designation inactive, formerly under direct Alliance command. If you’re hearing this, I’m dead.”
My voice sounds like gravel ground through steel.
“I don’t care about legacy. I don’t care about history. I care about truth. The Reaper project wasn’t defense. It wasn’t even deterrence. It was leverage. It was occupation without flags.”
I pause. Swallow. My hands won’t stop shaking.
“We were built to be used. And when we stopped being useful, they cut us loose like a defective limb. And now… now they want the node back. Not because they understand it. Not because they can contain it. But because someone told them it was valuable, and they don’t like not owning their toys.”
I glance at the node, humming like it’s breathing.
