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“Whatever you’re deciding inside that vault, decide fast.”

Fourteen minutes to finish the archive. Six before the main reinforcement reached us. There was no version where we got both.

I looked at the rows we hadn’t reached. His correspondence, decades of it, the hand I’d learned my letters copying. The treaty drafts. The evidence files on half the Conclave’s founders, the ones that would have hanged them in any honest court, evidence we could have used in every fight that came after this one.

As I watched, the counter turned thirty-nine. Sixty-one percent would remain on those shelves. I had fought six years to reach it.

The old rule came first: finish the mission, whatever it did to you personally. Men could be mourned. Objectives could not be abandoned. For six years I had treated that as command.

Lika stood at the door with her brother’s case in both arms. Zarek and Bronwen were fighting in the corridor. Below us, the others held the mezzanine. There was no acceptable number of them I would trade for the rest of the archive.

Every brother had made this choice before me. Talon for Tamsin bleeding in his arms. Zarek for Bronwen in the Burrow-Maw. Varrick for Sabine under Qeth’s gun. Brevan for Carys at the ravine. Kallum for Anhara on a burning farm.

I had watched each of them abandon the clean version of a mission for the person beside them and called it a personal exception. Standing in the vault, I finally understood they had been right every time.

“Talon.” I keyed the command channel. “We’re blown. Procedural, not a trap. Full extraction, landing bay, everyone converges now.”

“Already inbound.” No questions when it counted. “Ninety-second windows, so be where you say.”

“Varrick, Sabine, collapse the hub and move. Carys, join Brevan at the gallery. Anhara, link with Kallum on the east route. Kallum.”

“Clearing the east service landing,” Kallum said.

“Rig’s at thirty-nine,” Lika said. “Rylos. Fourteen minutes. Some of these cores are the only copies in existence. His correspondence. The evidence files. You understand what you’re...”

“I know what they are.” I pulled the feed cable. The counter froze at thirty-nine percent.

“They’re not my people. We take what’s loaded, we take the records case, we go. Zarek! Collapse and move!”

Behind the red wash, the shelves dimmed out of reach. I looked once.

“If the building survives us, we’ll come back for the rest.” Then I left.

The rifle fire shifted, disengaging by bounds. Bronwen reached the vault entrance, still laughing, slapping a fresh cell into her weapon. “They brought a whole squad to a corridor,” she reported, joyous. “A corridor. Zarek’s very disappointed in them.”

Lika waited at the door with the records. Before she turned to leave, she reached past the case and squeezed my arm.

Lika cleared the threshold. I pulled the hold-open release. A round had crushed its housing; the lever wouldn’t move. I shoved at the door. The catch held. Rifle fire struck the frame beside my hand.

“Door’s jammed open,” I said on the net. “Move.”

LIKA

Three levels stood between us and the throne floor, and the garrison contested every one.

It wasn’t clever. That was the thing my Conclave-trained hindbrain kept snagging on as we ran; there was no design in the response, no strategist directing it.

The garrison came from every available corridor in whatever order the lockdown had sent them, brave and confused and badly briefed. The crew I’d joined after the Virelle kept moving through them.

At the first turn, Rylos took Soren’s records case from my arms and clipped its strap across his body; Zarek handed me one of the garrison rifles he’d cleared at the vault door. The exchange took two seconds and no discussion.

At the freight junction, eight sets of boots pounded down the cross-corridor: no interval, no bounds. I heard them before I saw them.

“Junction, right side, eight, green,” I called, and the column reacted at once. Zarek took the corner. Bronwen went over a cargo pallet in a move I couldn’t have diagrammed and landed among their rear pair. The fight was over almost immediately, and we were moving again before the last man finished falling. For once, my read of a room belonged to people fighting beside me.

Men in garrison colors saw Zarek coming and made the reasonable decision to be somewhere else. Most made it. Bronwen worked beside him and the two of them always knew where the other was. Her laughter placed her for him; his brief calls did the same for her. Neither needed to turn and check.

“Freight junction, left,” I called. We cleared it while reinforcements poured toward the main lift banks, following doctrine I had helped write.