“I’m good. Just need air.”
“Mira.”
“Elaine, I promise. Bad sleep and worse food. That’s the whole diagnosis.” I straightened off the wall and gave her a smile I’d perfected over six months of lying to everyone. “Thank you, though. Really.”
She didn’t believe me. The clipboard lowered a fraction and her gaze held mine long enough to say so. But she let me go as usual, and I filed the interaction under the growing category of problems with expiration dates.
It was only a matter of time before she realized the truth. If Thiago caught wind of my pregnancy, the entire operation collapsed.
I needed to move faster.
The security hub sat on the second floor of the administrative wing, behind a door that required Level 3 clearance. My keycard was Level 2. The gap between those numbers was going to be the difference between a flare signal that worked and one that got me killed.
I walked the corridor twice during the morning shift change, counting cameras, noting which guards left first, how long the overlap lasted before the replacement arrived.
By noon, I had the security grid’s exterior access mapped.
I photographed the closet’s lock mechanism and the relay panel through the vent above the door. Added it to the file. Kept walking.
Training with Wyatt was scheduled for two o’clock. I got to the yard early and stretched alone, working through the sequence he’d taught me while my mind ran scenarios for the Purifier lockdown.
The Purifier itself was in sublevel three. I’d seen it during my last rotation.
A chamber with reinforced walls and a containment system designed for the feral wolves Thiago manufactured. Locking it down meant either destroying the equipment or cutting its power feed.
Diera Kaelwyn’s journal sat in the inner pocket of my jacket. I’d skimmed the first twenty pages before leaving camp, enough to recognize that Percy’s mother wrote neatly.
Wyatt didn’t show at two.
By two fifteen, the yard was still empty. The afternoon patrol had rotated past three times and each time I adjusted my stretching to look purposeful instead of abandoned.
By two thirty, there is a different knot in my stomach.
Wyatt was never late.
In weeks of training together, the man operated on a precision that rivaled Solomon’s, which was the highest compliment and the most irritating comparison I could make. His absence was a signal, and the signal said one of two things: either he’d been compromised, or he was making a decision.
I was packing up my gear when the training room door opened.
Wyatt stood in the frame. No training clothes or pads. He wore his tactical uniform, the one reserved for field operations, and he held a tablet in his right hand.
His face stopped me.
Not anger or grief or the fractures I’d seen building over weeks. This was a man who’d already fallen and was standing in the wreckage trying to figure out which direction was up.
He closed the door behind him and leaned against it.
“My parents,” he said.
Two words. My chest clenched.
“Wyatt...”
“I pulled the files.” He held up the tablet. “After what you said. Come to my door if I have doubts.” His jaw worked. “I had doubts. So I pulled the recruitment pipeline data from the archive you pointed me to. Cross-referenced the Purifier trial dates against the rogue incident reports.”
Percy’s discovery. The pattern that had been sitting in the Order’s own records for twenty years, invisible to anyone who wasn’t looking for it.
“A Purifier trial. A containment failure. A rogue attack on civilians. A recruitment wave.” Wyatt continued. His voice was flat in a way that wasn’t calm.
