My jaw locks so hard my teeth creak.
“Over my dead body,” I whisper.
The cage around the jalshagar rattles.
I don’t stop it this time.
I let a little of the feral energy bleed through my spine, not enough to deploy spurs or lose control, just enough to anchor my legs to the floor and keep my nervous system from short-circuiting into flight.
I erase my identity trail in seconds.
Every alias I’ve worn in the last decade gets burned to ash.
Every financial account detonates itself.
Every dead-drop relay I’ve used goes dark.
I trigger failsafes that collapse entire data nests I built years ago to stay invisible.
I burn my last safe credential.
My last legitimate biometric cover.
The final tether to the life I built pretending I was just another off-grid nobody in Alliance space evaporates in a burst of corrupted code and white noise.
Exposure is now permanent.
There is no going back to hiding.
There is no version of this where I vanish and resurface somewhere else alone.
I am officially a problem again.
The terminal goes quiet.
Too quiet.
I stand in the center of the room, staring at the blank screen, my hands hanging uselessly at my sides, my whole body vibrating with a collision of fury and terror and grief so dense it feels like gravity got heavier.
Everything I built is gone.
Every safehouse.
Every contingency plan.
Every careful inch of distance I carved between myself and Oversight just burned down in less than thirty seconds.
I press my palm flat against my sternum.
The jalshagar is there, hot and coiled and awake.
Her.
Always her.
The pull drags my attention sideways toward the other room again, toward the narrow cot where Kimberly is sleeping under a thin blanket with an IV line taped to her arm and dried blood still crusted at her hairline.
I close my eyes.
