Simone is still in the doorway.
“I’m going too,” she says.
“No,” I say.
“No.” Alexei. He hasn’t moved from the table. But the word is out, and now the room is looking at him.
Simone stares at him. He doesn’t look away.
Maximus’s eyes narrow. The man who defected over a children’s directive just objected to Simone joining the mission.
“I wasn’t asking either of you,” Simone says. Her attention is on Alexei and the edge in her voice is different than the one she was using on me.
“The answer’s still no,” I say. Before this becomes about him.
Her eyes come back to me.
Her arms drop. She pushes off the frame and steps into the room fully. The muscle she’s built since I left is visible in the set of her shoulders, in how her weight centers. The woman in front of me is not the same woman I pulled out of the medical wing.
“I know what those places are like, Celeste. Not from a screen, not from someone else’s memory. I know what the air tastes like inside those walls. I know what the locks sound like when they cycle. I know how the rooms feel when the lights go off. You need me.”
“I need you here.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No. It’s not.”
Her grip finds my arm. Hard. The fingers press into the muscle above my elbow with a strength she didn’t have before I left for Thessivane.
“You survived those rooms,” I say. “I’m not sending you back into them.”
Her face fractures. Into something sharper than pain.
“You sound like Maximus.”
“I know what I sound like,” I say. “The answer is still no. Not because you’re weak, but because you are the person who survived that place, and if something goes wrong inside those walls and I’m trying to get people out, I can’t be worrying about what being back in that building is doing to you.”
Her grip tightens.
“Bring them home,” she says. “All of them.”
I put my hand over hers on my arm.
“All of them.”
She lets go. Turns. Walks out of the conference room with the stride of a woman who is going to hit something very hard for the next several hours.
She doesn’t look back.
The nausea hitswhile I’m pulling on the vest.
I brace my hand against the wall. Three seconds. My vision grays at the edges, then clears.
Great. Tonight of all nights.
I pull the vest the rest of the way on. The body cam clips to the shoulder mount. Small. Black. The red light blinks once when I activate it.
Maximus is in the corridor.
