when you think they're gone. Check the third
pearl, Sunshine. You'll understand.
My breath catches. I look at the timestamp. The message was sent less than a minute ago. "Sterling," I say, or at least think I do. It comes out so soft it barely disturbs the air.
He's at my side immediately. "What?"
I show him the text. "That's impossible."
"I know,” I say, the words barely making it past my lips.
"Your mom is dead,” Sterling says carefully. “We just burned your father's body. No one would…" He trails off, jaw tight, eyes locked on the message.
"I know," I repeat. But my fingers are already moving to the necklace, finding the third pearl on the left side. I roll it between my fingers, and something inside it shifts. The pearl isn't solid. I twist it carefully. It unscrews with a tinyclick, revealing a hollow interior. Inside rests a microchip no bigger than a grain of rice.
"Cam," I call out, my hand shaking. "I need your smallest card reader. Now." He tosses me a device the size of a thumb drive. I carefully extract the microchip, slot it into the reader, and then plug it into my phone. A single video file appears. I press play.
The screen fills with my mom's face, but it’s not the video Wade showed me. This one is different. Her hair is down, and the lighting is softer. She's in a room I don't recognize. "Sunshine," she says, her voice clear and strong. "If you're watching this, then you found the pearl. Which means you're ready to know the truth." She leans forward, her eyes intense. "I'm not dead." The video continues, but I can't hear it over the roaring in my ears. Sterling catches me as my knees buckle, lowering me gently into a chair. On the screen, my mother keeps talking. "I had to disappear. Had to let Wade think he won. The Cicada program was bigger than just him, bigger than Angelina, bigger than I understood until it was too late. But I got out, and I've been waiting. Watching. Making sure you were safe until you were old enough to fight back." She touches the pearls at her throat—the same ones I'm wearing now. "By the time you see this, Wade is probably dead. Good. He deserved worse than whatever you gave him.” She leans closer to the camera, eyes fierce. “But the program is still running. There are children who need you. Pairs who need to be separated before Phase Three begins. And there areothers who were in the program years ago who need to know what was done to them."
The camera shifts slightly, and I see another woman I don’t recognize come into frame. She’s around my mom’s age with lifeless brown hair. We've been working together," my mom, her voice steady and urgent. "Building a case. Collecting evidence. The files you took from Wade are just the beginning. There's more. So much more. And the answers you're looking for—about your pairing, about what they did to you—they're all at the Nesting House." The video timestamp shows it was recorded two days ago.
Two days ago. While Wade was still alive and the manor was still whole. "Meet me at the Nesting House. Midnight. Bring Sterling. Bring your friends." She smiles then, and it's my smile. The one I make when I'm about to do something dangerous. "We've been underground for sixteen years, Sunshine. Just like the cicadas. But it's time to emerge. " The video ends.
I sit in the chair, staring at the black screen. "She's alive," I whisper.
Lila appears at my shoulder, having watched the video over my head. "Holy shit."
Cam is typing frantically. "I'm cross-referencing the metadata. The video was uploaded to a secure server two days ago. IP address is bouncing through seventeen different countries, but the origin point is..." he pauses, eyes narrowing at the screen," approximately two miles from the Nesting House."
Sterling crouches in front of me again, his hands warm and steady on my knees. "Kiera. Look at me." I meet his eyes. "Your mom is alive," he says carefully, each word deliberate. "Which means we need to move. Now. If she's been watching, she knows about Wade. She knows about the manor. And she's planning something big for tonight."
"She knows who I was paired with," I say quietly. "She knows if it was you."
Sterling's jaw tightens, a muscle ticking as he stares at me. "Then we meet her there. We get the children out. We burn the Nesting House to the ground. And we find out the truth. All of it."
"That's a lot of moving parts," Cam warns.
"Good thing we have fourteen hours to figure it out," I reply, shrugging off his warning.
I look around the warehouse at the makeshift family I've built. At Lila, who followed me into the darkness without question. At Cam, who hacked through walls to find the truth. At Sterling, who hasn’t faltered at any step along the way. "Let's free these kids,” I say, voice steady. “They’re done carrying someone else’s sins around."
The sun is fully up now, spilling golden light through the warehouse windows. We have until midnight. Until my mother emerges from underground. Until I find out if the boy in the basement was real…or if I've been chasing a ghost made of programmed memories and desperate hope. I touch the pearl necklace one more time, then let it fall back against my chest. "Everyone, get ready," I say. "We have a house to raid and a program to end." And this time, I'm not hiding. This time, I'm the one breaking down doors. Whether Sterling was meant to be mine or not, he's here now. And that's going to have to be enough…at least until midnight.
Chapter twenty-Six
Kiera's been awake for thirty-six hours straight. I can see it in the way her hands shake when she reaches for another file, in the dark circles bruising the skin under her eyes, in the way she sways slightly when she stands too fast. “Kiera,” I say, watching her scan another document with unfocused eyes. “You need to sleep.”
“I'm fine," she says automatically, not looking up from the page. She's said those exact words seventeen times in the last four hours. I've been counting.
“You're not,” I reply, taking the file from her hands. She tries to snatch it back, but her reflexes are sluggish, her fingers closing on empty air. “When was the last time you ate something that wasn't coffee?”
She blinks at me, processing the question as if I asked it in a foreign language. “I...yesterday? Maybe?”
“Maybe,” I repeat, softer this time. “Thorn, you killed your dad, burned down a house, and discovered your mother is alive…all in the span of twelve hours. Your body is running on fumes and adrenaline.”
“We have work to do,” she protests, reaching for the file again as her hands continue to shake. “The raid is in…”
“Ten hours,” I cut her off firmly. “Which gives you time for a four-hour nap, a shower, and actual food before we gear up.”
