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“Work fast,” I tell her.

Anita’s voice comes from behind me, fierce and steady. “That is the only speed I have.”

CHAPTER 17

ANITA

Smoke turns the occupied archive gallery into a world made of ghosts, muzzle flashes, and badly timed miracles.

I hit the lower ledge hard enough to jar my knees, but I do not fall because terror is apparently excellent for posture. The air smells of hot plastic, burned stone, and the sour electric bite of Brakk’s pulse jammer overloading the Choir’s sensor net. Gray smoke rolls across the gallery in thick sheets, swallowing platforms and bridges until everything beyond arm’s reach becomes suggestion. Somewhere to my left, Ghar meets the first soldier coming through the haze, and the sound of the impact is so brutal that every civilized thought in my head briefly packs a bag and leaves.

“Work fast,” he says, his voice cutting through the smoke from directly in front of me.

“That is the only speed I have,” I answer, and then I run.

Sira kneels inside the containment field ten meters ahead, her hands bound, her silver-white face strained beneath the pulsing restraint collar at her throat. The field around her flickers in vertical bands of blue-white light, unstable now that Brakk has blinded their control systems. Two Choir soldiers stand near the platform’s edge, disoriented by the smoke and sensor failure. One turns toward me too slowly. Brakk’s compact pistol cracks from behind my shoulder, and the soldier drops with a curse strangled by his helmet modulator.

Brakk shouts, “You’re welcome!”

“I was about to duck very impressively!”

“Duck faster next time!”

The second soldier lunges toward Sira with a shock prod. Ghar crosses through the smoke like wrath given muscles, catches the soldier’s wrist, and breaks it before driving him into the floor. I do not watch the rest because I cannot afford to become fascinated or horrified. Both reactions waste time.

I reach Sira and drop to my knees outside the containment field.

Her eyes lock on mine.

“Anita,” she says, but the collar flashes and crushes the word into a rasp.

“I know, I know,” I whisper, yanking my scanner from my belt. “No talking. Evil jewelry is rude.”

Sira’s mouth curves faintly despite the pain.

The collar is worse up close. It is not standard restraint tech, not military, not Coalition, not League. It has been modified with ruin-compatible resonance nodes, tiny black chips embedded along the inner curve where they sit against her throat. Every pulse of light from the collar answers a matching tremor in the containment field. If I cut the wrong circuit, it may choke her. If I disrupt the field too aggressively, it may discharge through her body. If I hesitate too long, the Choir will recover enough coordination to kill us all.

No pressure.

My scanner reads the interface and immediately protests with three error tones.

“Yeah, nobody asked for your opinion,” I mutter.

Sira’s eyes move toward the console behind her.

I follow the glance.

The Choir technician’s station is still active on the platform edge, a portable black command slab wired directly into a ruin-grown console. I can see the Choir’s overlay through the smoke: maps, containment routes, resonance logs, fragments of translated archive text, and a file structure so extensive that my anger briefly outruns my fear.

They have records.

Not scraps.

Not rumors.

Records.

“Oh, you hypocritical bastards,” I breathe.