“You need to get help. My sister?—”
“Can I let you go? I asked, tightening my grip to reinforce control.
A beat.
Then he nodded.
I released him and stepped in front of him, keeping the distance between us small enough to react, but not enough to escalate, the darkness between us thick, neither of us able to see more than shape and movement, but the body cam would capture any conversation that mattered.
“You have three minutes,” I said. “Tell me what I need to know.”
“What do you want to?—”
“People, places, extraction.”
He dragged in a breath, eyes flicking once toward the perimeter before locking back on me, and when he spoke, it came fast.
“There’s an event in two days.”
“Time?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay, we have eleven guards on our feeds plus you, agreed?”
“There’s a secondary team that comes in from the east side on transport day.”
“How many are collared like you?”
“Three of us. All kids who aged out.”
I filed it, already adjusting routes in my head. “And your sister?”
He swallowed. “She’s inside, lower level, locked down with the other girls. She’s—” He cut himself off. “People are coming for her in two days. Please help me get her out before they takeher. Don’t worry about me, but you need to get to her. I couldn’t help my brothers and?—”
“If I can.”
His head snapped up. “You have to get her away?—”
I channeled my inner-Caleb because that was what he would say, then I stepped closer. “She’ll be my priority, but I don’t make promises I can’t execute.”
He gripped my arm. “There’s a door on the west side, service access, it sticks unless you lift it when you open it. No one uses it because it jams, and they cut the power to the alarm there.”
“Stay on your pattern,” I told him. “Don’t change anything. Don’t say anything. Don’t trust any cops.”
“And Eden?”
I held his gaze. “We’re coming for you both.”
It was enough.
I stepped back into the shadows, gone before he could say anything else, leaving him exactly where I’d found him, the blind spot closing behind me as if I’d never been there at all.
TWENTY-ONE
Caleb
When Novak left,I turned back to the screens, collating everything Lyric had sent, everything we’d scraped from the perimeter cams, every fragment of data that might give us an edge. I replayed the audio we’d lifted from previous guard rotation twice, then a third time, isolating voices, mapping cadence, identifying patterns buried in the noise. There was something wrong with the signal for the collar that Noah was wearing, a frequency that didn’t fit the pattern.
