Lucian’s hand landed on my shoulder. Not possessive. Final.
“It’s not negotiable, Mira. We walk you to the perimeter. We watch you enter. And if anything goes wrong between here and those walls, we are taking you away from this place and nothing you say will change that.”
I looked at each of them. Immovable. A mountain range in human form that I did not have the energy or the time to erode.
“Fine.”
They walked me through the forest. Not the tunnel. The surface route that skirted the eastern perimeter, using the tree coverage that Solomon had mapped weeks ago. Percy on my left, Lucian on my right, Solomon ahead, clearing the path.
We reached the tree line at the compound’s eastern edge. The perimeter floodlights swept across the grounds in rotation, painting the concrete in white bands that moved with mechanical regularity.
I turned toward the light. The compound loomed against the night sky, industrial and gray, the place where my mother died and my father built an empire on her corpse.
“Forty-eight hours,” I said without turning around.
No answer.
I closed my eyes. Just for a second. The bond pulsed once, three points of warmth so distinct I could name them. Then I opened my eyes, blinked against the floodlight glare, and looked behind me.
The tree line was empty. No movement, no sound, no trace that three alphas had been standing there seconds ago.
Just the forest and the dark and the fading pulse in my chest that saidwe’re here, we’re watching, come back.
I turned toward the compound and walked through the eastern service entrance.
The compound was quieter at night. Skeleton crew on rotation, corridors empty, the surveillance cameras sweeping their usualarcs. I slipped through the halls I’d memorized months ago and found my bunk. Set an alarm for an hour before dawn. Closed my eyes without expecting sleep.
Sleep came anyway. Apparently my body had decided that rest was non-negotiable, regardless of what my brain thought about the situation.
The alarm pulled me out at 4 AM. I dressed, pocketed the keycard, and moved through the pre-dawn corridors to the lower sublevel.
Wyatt was already waiting in the grid room.
A windowless box filled with server racks and access terminals and the particular hum of electronics that made my teeth buzz. He’d already pulled the first terminal offline and had the maintenance cover removed, wires exposed.
“You look terrible,” he said.
“That’s like the only compliment you tell me.”
I dropped my pack and pulled the chair to the second terminal. My fingers found the keycard slot and the screen lit up, rows of system codes scrolling in green text.
“Access point one,” Wyatt said. “I’ll run the routing override from here. You strip the redundancy on the failsafe. When the signal comes, both terminals need to execute within the same three-second window or the grid reboots.”
“Three seconds. Got it.”
We worked in silence for ten minutes. The kind of focus that didn’t allow for conversation, fingers moving through command prompts, disabling layers of the security infrastructure one by one. The compound’s grid was old but thorough. Cameras, door locks, comms, the sublevel containment seals. All routed through this room. All killable from these two terminals if the prep was done right.
At the twelve-minute mark, I stopped typing.
“Wyatt.”
He looked up.
“No matter what happens in the next forty-eight hours, you play your part.” I held his gaze. Steady. Deliberate. “Whatever changes, whatever goes sideways, you do what we discussed. All of it.”
His jaw tightened. The look he gave me carried more weight than the words between us.
“I trust you,” I said.
