“How long?” I bark at the scanner readout.
The beacon pulses again, stronger.
ESTIMATED RESPONSE TIME: 3–7 MINUTES (LOCAL)
My stomach drops.
“They’re close,” I whisper.
Lonari rips a tool from his belt and jams it into Morazin’s mouth—prying, twisting. Morazin screams, muffled, spitting blood and metal.
“Kill him,” Morazin gurgles between coughs, still smug. “Go on. Prove you’re an animal.”
Lonari’s eyes are incandescent with rage, but his hands stay controlled. He doesn’t kill. He disables.
He tears the embedded module free with a wet snap, then crushes it in his fist like it’s nothing.
The beacon readout flickers… but doesn’t die.
My blood runs colder.
“It transmitted already,” I say, voice shaking.
The safehouse lights flicker once—subtle, but enough.
Jordan’s ears catch something beyond the walls: a distant metallicthunk… then another. Like heavy boots hitting concrete outside the perimeter.
Then the sound of cutting tools.
Plasma on metal.
They’re not knocking.
They’re breaching.
Lonari turns to me, eyes sharp. “Grab what you can.”
“I need—” I start, mind racing.
“Now,” he snaps.
I force my hands to move. I open my compad’s capture module and slam into Morazin’s restraint system—Kaijen cuffs have codes, override strings, specific encryption seeds. If we lose him, I need the key to track him.
I rip the restraint codes off the system and store them in three places: internal compad, Kaijen archive, dead-drop shard.
Then I focus on Morazin.
His mouth is bleeding. One tooth is missing. His eyes are wild now—not smug anymore, just survival.
I lean close, voice low. “You think you just won?”
Morazin spits blood. “I think you’re out of time.”
“Maybe,” I whisper. “But I’m still taking something from you.”
I flick my compad into biometric scan mode and press it close to his face—his eye, his skin, his mouth, the torn tooth cavity.
“Hold still,” I hiss.
