“Stay close,” I said. Everything in me pushed for speed, because speed would break them and noise would kill us, and so we traveled painfully slow with the girls tight behind me. Eden faltered two steps in.
“She’s been really sick,” another girl said.
I scooped her up and adjusted her weight against me without breaking stride as I worked out balance, speed, and our exit route.
“Noah,” Eden said, voice thin, clutching at my shirt. “Noah’s here. I don’t know where they took Ezra and Seth?—”
“Everyone’s okay,” I said, the lie landing clean and necessary as I met Kai’s eyes over her head for a fraction of a second and saw he understood it as clearly as I did. We had no idea if Noah was okay, and he wouldn’t be unless Caleb and Zach had already found Michael and disabled the collars, which meant we needed to move faster without making a sound.
Outside, the air hit different, colder, cleaner, but it didn’t cut through what we’d come out of, and I pushed the girls into the shadows where two more kids stood waiting, both collared, both frozen in that same braced posture I was starting to recognize. The moment the girls reached them they bunched together on instinct, as if safety existed in numbers even if none of us could promise it. I didn’t waste time, dropping to my knees in front of the first one and snapping the cutters into place, metal giving under pressure as I worked through removing each collar in turn, quick, efficient.
“Where’s Noah?” Eden asked, voice stronger now but still heavy with fear, and I glanced back toward the door, already calculating how I’d get Caleb to be the one to explain if we didn’t rescue her brother.
“He’s safe,” I lied. The door opened and Zach stepped out with Noah at his side, and there was her brother. I adjusted without missing a beat, as Noah stumbled toward us, his collardifferent, more complex, metal set into the skin at his neck in a way that made something in me go cold.
I got close, braced him, cut the collar as best I could and yanked.
He gasped as the mechanism came free, blood welling but not enough to slow us, not enough to matter right now, and I pressed a hand briefly to steady him before tapping my comm.
“Everyone’s out,” I said. “Status.”
A beat.
“Caleb?”
“Downloading,” he said in my ear. “Get everyone out of a potential blast radius. I mean,seriouslyfar away.”
“What?” That sounded like a warning, and I didn’t like that at all. What blast radius? “I’m coming to you.”
“No! Get everyone away.”
Fuck that.
I turned to Zach and Kai, already shifting into the next phase. “Get them out of here,” I said. “Back to the cabin. It’s a long walk, but it’s safe. We’ll be right behind you.”
Zach nodded, already organizing the group, Kai falling in at the rear without argument, his earlier chaos gone, as they began to head into the dark, Zach scooping Eden into his arms.
I didn’t watch them go.
I turned back toward the building.
Caleb was still inside.
That overrode everything.
I moved fast, back through the door, up the stairs, taking them two at a time, heading straight for where he would be, because there was no version of this where I left him behind.
I found him in the comms room, hunched over the system, screens alive with code and progress bars, and the second he saw me, he didn’t slow, didn’t stop, just said, “I told you to leave.”
“And I didn’t.”
“Fuck,” he snapped, then sighed heavily. “Is everyone else away?”
“Yes.”
He indicated the keyboard. “Downloading is set to trigger a failsafe, and I can’t find a way around it.”
“Failsafe, how?”
