"My job was to expose the truth, no matter who it hurt. They took that from me. They took everything from me. They used you to do it." His grip tightens. "I want it back. And I want them to pay for what they did. To me. To you. To all those children who never got a choice."
"Is that a yes?"
"That's a hell yes."
I look around the room. My brothers. Elliot. Jonah. Five people against an organization that's been operating in shadows for centuries.
The odds are terrible. The risk is catastrophic. There's a very real chance that none of us will survive what's coming.
But for the first time in my life, I'm not alone. For the first time, I'm fighting for something I chose.
"Okay," I say. "Let's plan a war."
We work through the afternoon and into the evening.
Elliot makes sandwiches at some point, appearing with plates that get picked at between discussions of entry points and exit strategies. The coffee pot gets emptied and refilled three times. The fire burns low and someone adds more logs without being asked.
This is what family looks like. Not the manufactured bonds the Foundry tried to create, not the handler relationship we had with Marcus. This is real. Messy and imperfect and chosen in spite of it all.
The Geneva facility is a challenge. It's built into the mountainside, accessible only by a single road and a private airstrip. Security is tight. Cameras, motion sensors, armed guards on rotation. The kind of security that says "nothing to see here" while screaming the opposite.
"Here." Jonah leans over the table, pointing at a section of the blueprints we pulled from Moore's archive. "This maintenance tunnel. It connects to the main facility from a service building two hundred meters west."
"That's a lot of ground to cover exposed," Jace observes.
"Not if we time it right. The guard rotation has a gap." Jonah traces the path with his finger. "Here. Three minutes between the west patrol and the north sweep. Enough time to get from the tree line to the service building."
"You've done this before," Jinx says. Not a question.
"I spent five years investigating places that didn't want to be found. You learn to read security patterns." Jonah shrugs. "Before your people erased all that experience, anyway."
"It's coming back," I say. "Faster than I expected."
"Some things you don't forget. Even when you forget everything else."
Elliot pauses, “I thought we were going to try get to Kreiss’ vault first?”
“Yeah. That was the plan, but Jinx thinks it would make more sense to just hit the facility. The chances are high that he kept the files somewhere there anyway. Might as well kill two birds with one stone, right?” Jace answers.
“Oh. Okay. Ya’ll move too fast for me to keep up. Just let me know when it’s my turn to do some nerdy computer stuff, otherwise I’m going to start on dinner.” Elliot frowns and moves towards the kitchen, Jace trailing behind him, apologizing for not keeping him in the loop.
We keep working. Jinx contributes knowledge of Foundry protocols, the specific training in the pits that guards at facilities like this would have received. Having grown up in different parts of the Foundry, we all contribute the knowledge we have in building out potential scenarios we might encounter.
"The children are the priority," I say, as the sun starts to set outside the windows. "Everything else is secondary. We get them out. Two teams. One on retrieval, one on files."
"How many kids are we talking about?" Jace asks.
"Based on the facility's capacity, anywhere from twenty to fifty. Different ages, different stages of development." I pull up a document that makes my stomach turn every time I look at it. "The youngest are infants. The oldest are maybe twelve or thirteen. Old enough to have started Foundry training."
"Old enough to fight back," Jinx says grimly.
"Possibly. We'll need to be prepared for that. They won't know we're trying to help them. They'll only know that their routine is being disrupted." I think about my own training at that age. The fear. The confusion. The certainty that any deviation from protocol meant punishment. "We need someone who can connect with them. Make them understand."
Everyone looks at Elliot.
"Me?" He blinks. "Why me?"
"Because you were an asset. You know what it's like to be treated as property. You know how to talk to people who've been broken." Jace's hand finds his. "And because you're the least threatening person in this room."
