Because the truth was far more dangerous.
I wasn’t trapped.
I wasplaced.
And now that I was here, the game had already started.
5
Logan
The anomaly was small.
So small, no one else flagged it.
That was the problem with systems built to catch chaos—they missed intention.
I stared at the environmental readouts scrolling across Boone’s tablet, my mind already three steps ahead of the data. Power draw. Temperature variance. Micro-flickers in the grid.
Nothing dramatic.
Nothing loud.
“Run the convoy site overlay against the nearest subterranean facilities,” I said.
Boone frowned. “We already did—nothing active in a fifty-mile—”
“Run it again,” I said. “And don’t look for signal spikes. Look forabsence.”
Russ leaned closer. “Absence of what?”
“Noise,” I replied.
Boone re-ran the parameters, narrowing the scan, stripping out anything that didn’t belong. The room went quiet except for the hum of the servers and the distant chop of rotors outside.
Then—
“There,” Boone said softly.
I leaned in.
A minor power fluctuation. Not enough to trigger alarms. Not enough to log as a breach. A fractional dip in pressure sensors tied to a facility we didn’t officially acknowledge existed.
Black-site adjacent. Old infrastructure. Recommissioned quietly.
Sentinel territory.
My pulse steadied instead of spiking.
That told me everything.
“She moved,” I said.
Russ blinked. “Moved how?”
“She didn’t try to escape,” I said. “Shemarkedherself.”
Boone looked up sharply. “You’re saying she left a trail?”
