Lila skids to a stop, gravel spraying. “Go. I'll loop around and wait for your signal or thirty minutes, whichever comes first. If you’re not out by then, I’m coming in.”
“Don't,” I say, opening the door. Cold mountain air bites my face. “If we're not out, you get to the FBI. The files in the truck. Make sure someone knows.”
“Bitch, I'm not leaving you,” Lila snaps, eyes blazing with fierce loyalty.
“Thirty minutes,” I repeat, slipping into the dark.
Sterling moves ahead of me, a shadow among shadows. I follow, my boots silent on the wet gravel. The east entrance is a metal service door, propped open with a cinder block. Inside, a single bulb flickers, illuminating a concrete hallway that slopes downward into the dark.
The smell hit me first—concrete, bleach, and something sharper underneath. Antiseptic and old fear. I stop breathing through my nose and follow Sterling inside. The hallway goes down, deep into the mountain. Cinderblock walls painted beige. Sealed concrete floor. As we move, the fancy Victorian facade above us peels away, revealing something older. The basement. The real Nesting House. “It's a bunker,” Sterling whispers, eyes scanning the walls. “The whole mountain is hollow.”
Cam's crackling voice is in my ear. “Thermal imaging shows three buses in the south courtyard. Kids are being loaded. But I'm picking up heat signatures in the lower levels too. Sub-basement. They didn't get everyone out yet.”
“Or they're hiding some,” I say, the words tasting bitter on my tongue.
We reach an intersection. Left leads up toward the main building and the chaos of the evacuation. Right leads deeper down, into the dark. A sign on the wall points right: WARD C. Below it, a stenciled cicada. I stop. The necklace at my throat felt suddenly heavy.
“You came.” The voice came from the darkness ahead. Female. Clinical. Cold. We both raise our weapons. A woman steps into the dim light. She wore a white lab coat over tactical gear. Her dull brown hair is pulled into a tight bun. Forty, maybe older, with the rigid posture of a woman who has never questioned her own authority. In her hand, she holds a tablet. On her chest, a name tag: DR. REYES. FACILITY DIRECTOR. “Kiera Hawthorne,” she says, her eyes moving to me. “And Sterling Wraith. Two of my runaways. Returned to the nest at last.”
“Step away from the door,” I order, my Glock trained on her chest.
She doesn't move. “You shouldn't have killed Wade,” she says calmly. “He was the only other one who knew the disarm codes for the sub-levels. The security system is now in lockdown. The children downstairs? They're sealed in. If you shoot me, they stay sealed. Starvation takes about three weeks…but the oxygen will run out much sooner.”
“We'll find another way,” Sterling says, his voice steady and utterly certain.
“There is no other way,” Dr. Reyes says, tapping her tablet with a clinical calmness. “But I'm not interested in dying today. I'm interested in showing you what you missed.” She turns the tablet toward us. The screen lights up with grainy, dated footage of a white room. A small girl with auburn hair sat alone at a table, drawing with crayons—purple and yellow streaks across thepaper. She’s maybe seven or eight, wearing a pearl necklace, singing softly to herself.Me. “You were here,” Dr. Reyes confirms. “2007 to 2008. Fifteen months in Ward C. Solitary confinement for the first six months. Behavioral modification for the next nine. You were a difficult subject, Kiera. You wouldn't stop singing. You kept looking for your mother.”
She swipes the screen. New footage of a different room. A young boy with dirty blonde hair sits alone in a corner, his knees drawn to his chest, rocking slightly.Sterling. “You were in Ward B,” Dr. Reyes continues, her eyes moving to him. "Different ward. Different protocol. Your conditioning progressed rapidly, and you grew too attached to your pairing. Wade intervened early, Sterling. He removed you from the program before it was completed. Claimed he had alternative plans."
Sterling stares at the screen, his face unreadable. "I don't remember."
"Of course you don't," Dr. Reyes says, her tone almost pitying. "The chemical intervention was extensive—isolated systems. You briefly occupied the same facility. I wish I could tell you who your pairings were, but it was so long ago. As far as I’m concerned, you're both independent variables in the same equation."
She steps closer, her voice dropping to a silky whisper. "The children downstairs—the seventeen—they remain in Phase Two. Isolation until the personality fragments, then reconstruction. You could have been them if Wade hadn't redirected you for his own needs."
An alarm screams through the facility—high, piercing, desperate. Red lights strobe along the corridor. Cam's voice explodes in my ear, frantic. "Kiera! You've got incoming. Six heavy armored vehicles.. They know you're there!"
Dr. Reyes doesn't flinch at the alarm. If anything, the corners of her mouth tighten into something resembling satisfaction—as though the chaos confirms a hypothesis she's been testing for years. "Six armored vehicles," she says, her voice cutting through the siren's wail. "Wade's private securitycontractors. He hired them two years ago when he realized the program was on the brink of weakening. They're not coming to save the children, Miss. Hawthorne. They're coming to erase the program."
Sterling's weapon doesn't waver, but I see his shoulders tense, the muscle in his neck ticking as he processes the new threat in a heartbeat. We have seconds, not minutes. "Give us the codes," I demand, stepping closer—close enough to smell the antiseptic on her coat. "Now."
"Or you'll shoot me?" She raises an eyebrow, the picture of calm superiority. "Then you lose the codes, the children die, and you face six trucks of mercenaries with no leverage. Think tactically, Kiera. Your mother was excellent at tactical thinking."
The mention of my mom stops me cold. "You know where she is."
"I know where shewas," Reyes corrects. "Sixteen years ago, when she tried to burn this place to the ground. She didn't have the codes then, either. She had to choose between saving you and saving the others." Reyes tilts her head, a faint, knowing smile touching her lips. "She chose you. Left seventeen children to another day's work. Your mother was never the saint she pretended to be, Kiera. She was a calculated woman who weighed lives like currency. She sacrificed those children without hesitation, the moment it suited her. She played the martyr beautifully, didn’t she?"
The siren screams louder. Boots thunder overhead—heavy, organized, closing in fast. "Thirty seconds to breach," Cam's voice cracks through my earpiece. "Guys, you need to movenow."
Reyes holds up her tablet. The screen shows a pulsing red biometric lock interface. "I can open Ward C,” she says calmly. “But I walk out of here alive. Not in cuffs. Not to answer for my work."
"Your work is child torture," Sterling growls, the words low and venomous, his weapon still aimed at her chest.
"My work is evolution," she snaps, her clinical composure cracking for the first time. "And you have three seconds to decide if you're going to kill yourself for vengeance, or if you're going to let me save those children."
We both look at each other. In his eyes, I see the same calculation. The same cold math we both learned over the years. The math that says:The living matter more than the dead. For now." Move," I tell Reyes, grabbing her arm, twisting it hard behind her back. She gasps but doesn't resist. "You open that door. You get them out. Then we talk about your exit strategy."
"Kiera…" Cam warns, his voice tight with hesitation.
