I pull her close, heart hammering.
“Something’s wrong.”
The glyphs on the console begin to flicker.
The lights shift from green to red.
The air tastes like ozone and lightning and old, deep things.
The system shouldn’t be waking.
It’s not supposed to.
But it is.
And it’s angry.
And it knows us.
The last thing I hear before the power flares is Kimberly whispering, “Tur?—”
Then the world goes white.
CHAPTER 31
KIMBERLY
It starts with pressure. Not a sound, not even a tremor—just this awful, inescapable pressure building in the walls, behind my teeth, down in the soles of my boots like the planet itself just inhaled and doesn’t know how to exhale. The lights overhead flicker red, then white, then red again. Systems scream warnings in languages nobody speaks anymore.
And then all hell comes for us.
The first blast hits a tunnel entrance northeast of the old prep kitchen. It tears through the corridor like it’s made of paper, shoving shockwaves down the line, rattling the Reaper-metal bones of the chamber and sending centuries-old dust down in sheets. I don’t flinch. I can’t afford to. My hand slams down on the command board, switching feeds, scanning for entry breaches.
“North three compromised,” I bark into the comm. “Mara, reroute evac to west two—seal the spillway behind them.”
“On it!” her voice crackles back. “Ishaan’s got the corridor fallback. We’ll move the second group now.”
Screams—distant, fragmented—bleed through from secondary channels. Static churns behind them like a storm made of ghosts.
I pivot to Tur’s last feed location—south catacombs, three levels below. He’s already mid-combat. Gunfire, hand-to-hand, claws out and red, his body moving like the gravity here bends different for him. He doesn’t see the third attacker on his six. I slam the override for a wall mine. The corridor lights flash once. Boom. The body disappears in a blur of dust and viscera.
“Saved your ass,” I mutter.
Tur grunts through his channel. “You’re watching my six now?”
“Always.”
He doesn’t say thank you.
Doesn’t have to.
The second wave hits harder. Bigger ordinance. Two synchronized breaches—east access hatch and lower vault stairs. I hear the explosion before the report comes in. The floor under my boots shivers. The air chokes with the stink of burning plascrete and something wet and coppery. I know that smell.
Syndicate chatter clogs our hacked comm lines, all overlapping panic and betrayal. One of the Nine lieutenants is screaming about route permissions. Another accuses someone of selling them out to the Alliance. A third calls for extraction—and gets silence.
I press a button on my secondary console. “Patch all syndicate channels to broadcast loop Theta-Seven. Scramble team IDs. Feed them the old NovaTech encryption bluff.”
“On your mark,” Ishaan confirms.
