“He’s going to make me choose something worse than death.”
69
Aaron
Location: Moving
Time: Same
“Tell me,” I say.
No room for comfort. No room for hesitation.
If there’s a nightmare coming, I want it named.
Lark doesn’t look away this time.
“They’re going to force a scenario,” she says. “Layered. Timed. Designed to collapse on itself.”
“How?”
“They’ll build a cascade,” she replies. “Multiple failure points across different systems—energy, transport, communications. Each one feeding the next. I’ve seen this in the archives, and there was nothing I could do.”
I process it fast.
Too fast.
Because I already know where this is going.
“What kind of catastrophic?” I ask.
Her eyes meet mine.
Steady.
Unflinching.
“The kind you don’t get to recover from.”
Silence hits hard.
The vehicle hums beneath us, but inside—it’s dead quiet.
I feel the shift.
This isn’t prevention anymore.
This is triage.
Then Ronan speaks, voice low, precise.
“He’s not chasing chaos,” he says. “He’s engineering meaning.”
Lark nods once.
“Yes.”
Ronan’s eyes flick to me.
