“Not yet,” I lie. “He will.”
I find him later.
Not in body, thank gods. He’s upright. Barely. Bloodied and half-limping, claws dull with dried gore. He’s standing on the roof of what used to be a public records hall, overlooking the broken skyline like it owes him something.
“You could’ve died,” I say, no preamble.
“So could you.”
“That wasn’t the deal.”
He looks at me, eyes dark, unreadable. “There was no deal, Kimberly. There was survival. There was choice.”
I step closer. “And you chose to light the fuse without warning me.”
“I chose to end the thing that was eating us alive.”
Silence stretches between us. He’s trembling. From exhaustion, maybe. From pain. I don’t know. I don’t reach for him. Not yet.
“You think they’ll let you live this down?” I ask.
“They can try,” he says. “But I’m done hiding.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“I’m breathing.”
“For now.”
He finally smiles, slow and cracked. “You gonna patch me up or keep making speeches?”
I move toward him.
Neither of us flinches.
Reconstruction begins in waves, uneven and urgent. No ceremony. Just tools and hands and hearts that refuse to be quiet. A kid drags rebar across the former wine cellar, trying to rebuild the wall that shielded our last stand. Ishaan helps an old man map power circuits by candlelight. Mara drinks straight from the still while marking evac routes in charcoal on what’s left of the walk-in freezer door.
I stand in the middle of it all, bare feet dusted in ash, head high, voice clear.
“Not one more family gets displaced,” I say. “Not one more lie replaces history. Not while I’m standing.”
Novaria listens.
And then Novaria answers.
CHAPTER 34
TUR
They give me forty-eight hours.
Forty-eight hours to kneel. To vanish. To prove I’m still theirs. Still broken. Still programmable.
The official comm is sterile—Alliance letterhead, sealed code, some poor comms officer's voice trying to sound brave while calling me unstable, dangerous, noncompliant. A rogue Reaper asset responsible for catastrophic infrastructure sabotage and widespread civilian unrest. They dress it up in bureaucracy, but the message underneath is naked as hell.
Come quietly, or we’ll come for you.
Kimberly reads it before I do. We’re in what’s left of the war room, cables still hanging like veins from the ceiling, everything sticky with humidity and leftover adrenaline. She reads silently at first, her mouth a hard line, knuckles whitening around the data-slab. I don’t speak until she finishes, because I know what’s coming.
