Three lines in, Mara leans closer, reading over my shoulder. “You’re leaving out location stamps.”
“If they’re worth anything, they’ll find us. If they’re not, the stamps won’t save us.”
She falls silent. But I feel her watching. I always feel her watching.
“You think they’ll come?” she asks after a beat.
“No.”
“But you’re doing it anyway.”
“Because if we don’t try,” I say, looking at her now, “then we’ve already lost.”
There’s something like pride in her eyes, but it’s tempered with grief. Like she knows what we’re trading for this chance.
“I don’t need them to come,” I say softly. “I just need them to see the fire’s still burning.”
I finish the sequence.
One last keystroke, and the payload loads—wrapped, coded, silently lethal in its own way. Not a bomb. Not a virus. Just truth. Compressed and weaponized and aimed like a bullet at everything the Coalition built in shadow.
I hesitate.
Not because I doubt it.
Because I know this is the last quiet moment we get.
Mara doesn’t speak. She just reaches over and lays her hand on mine, grounding me. Her skin is cold, but her grip is solid.
I hit send.
The cursor blinks.
Then vanishes.
The screen clears.
A simple confirmation appears: SIGNAL RECEIVED.
And that’s it.
But I feel it in my chest like a detonation.
When I look at Mara again, she’s not smiling.
But her eyes are on fire.
And that’s all the answer I need.
There’s no going back now.
The screen’s afterglow still pulses faintly behind my eyes as I rise, the tension in my shoulders refusing to shake loose. My hand drifts instinctively to the sidearm holstered at my thigh—not because I need it now, but because the act of touching it calms me. A ritual. A tether. The kind of thing you do before war.
Mara’s already moving. She paces the length of the broken chamber like the floor is laced with traps only she can see. Her mind’s moving faster than her mouth, but her jaw flexes like she’s chewing through numbers, probabilities, firewalls. When she speaks, it’s all at once.
“If we hijack the subgrid transmission node embedded in the sat spine at junction nine, we can bypass the lower-tier admin locks and use the override credential backdoor on the ministerial level.”
I blink.
