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Maven grins. “Knew you’d see reason.”

The rest of the meeting falls into logistics: who’s carrying what, which tunnels we’ll map first, fallback points, windows of action and signal codes. Rosie volunteers to handle the power cut—”You need a saboteur, not a soldier,” she says—and no one argues. The relay job is assigned to two of Maven’s regulars, faces I barely know but trust by proxy.

An almost tangible shift carries the room from jittery chatter to grim focus. There’s no more debate—just the click and clatter of pack checks and map spreads. Kang runs through his kit with clinical precision, dismantling and reassembling his rifle three times in as many minutes. I’m bent over the table scribbling notes, combing through the last error logs for patterns in the garbage data Maven’s techs pulled from the uplink.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, Rosie produces a bottle of something clear and volatile, sets it between me and Kang. “For luck,” she says, though I’m not sure if she means the drink or us. We each take a slug. The burn is immediate, but it cleans out the nerves.

Maven perks up “Diana,” they say, pointing to me, “first thing tomorrow you start working on the Echo Sphere. We’ll need every insight you can dig up.” They swivel to the rest of us. “Over the next few days we’ll run through every piece of this plan, iron out contingencies, and build in redundancies. No surprises.”

Their pen hits the table like a gavel. “That’s it. Get some rest. Tomorrow’s a long day and a longer night.” Their smile is all teeth but no warmth. “We’re going to need every ounce of it.”

Chairs scrape, maps fold. The tension breaks into a low buzz as people scatter—Rosie hauling her bandoliers off toward the sewing alcove, the kids gathering their tools, someone shouldering a drone carcass like a rifle. In minutes the war-room chaos dissolves back into hallways and corners, each person carrying their own bit of the storm.

Kang waits for the flow to thin, then touches my elbow. “Come on,” he says quietly.

Our room feels even smaller now—bare walls, one narrow bed, a table with two tin cups. I shut the door behind us, and the muffled noise of sanctuary fades to a dull hum.

We undress without ceremony, clothes landing in loose piles at the foot of the bed. My body feels like concrete: heavy, cracked, holding up too much. The Sphere, the plan, the Authority, all of it pressing down like a thumb on a bruise. I crawl under the thin blanket, staring at the water stain on the ceiling, and try to breathe.

The mattress shifts as Kang slides in beside me. He hooks an arm around my waist and draws me back against him until my spine fits the curve of his chest, his breath warm at the nape of my neck. A soft kiss lands just below my ear—gentle, almost apologetic.

“You’ve done it before,” he murmurs. “You can do it again.”

The words jolt me. I twist around to face him, sheets bunching at our hips. “What the fuck does that mean?” The question comes out sharper than I intend.

For a heartbeat something flickers across his face—guilt, maybe, or recognition—but then it’s gone. He shrugs, eyes sliding away. “I meant you’ve beaten the odds before. In the pit. In every op. You always do.” He tries for a smile. It doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

I study him, a prickle of unease crawling up my ribs. He’s hiding something. Or maybe I’m just imagining it, projecting my own nerves onto the only steady thing left in my life. Either way, the feeling won’t leave.

I sigh and press a quick kiss to his cheek. “We should sleep. We’ve got a lot of planning with Maven and the others tomorrow.”

His arms tighten around me, a silent promise or a silent apology—I can’t tell which. I let my head rest on his shoulder, eyes closing against the pulse at his throat. For a long moment neither of us moves.

Then the generator hum fades to background, the day’s noise collapses into dark, and we both slip under, tangled together, carrying our separate secrets into sleep.

The first sense is not vision, not even touch, but the taste: ozone, high and sharp, spiking the back of my tongue. It blooms into cold, sterile air—the kind that lingers in the centrifuge banks, where everything is chrome and stainless, and every footstep echoes off a ribcage of steel. In the dream, my hands work a keyboard. Not the stubby, grease-smeared keys of Authority issue, but something older, vintage, the surface chipped and cool under my fingers. I’m typing in a rhythm I don’t remember learning, but the words flow as if I’ve written them a hundred times: sequence numbers, chemical sigils, instructions for a protocol called “ECHO INITIATE.” My hair is longer here, thick and black, falling past my shoulders. The weight of it distracts, keeps swinging into my field of vision no matter how many times I shake it back.

The centrifuges sing—a layered whine, accelerating into a perfect, razor note. I glance over. Each tube spins a different color, separating into bands that glow under UV. The hum is so loud it rattles the lab benches, vibrates up into my molars.

The air is saturated with antiseptic: bleach and isopropyl and the sweet afterburn of ozone. Every surface is wiped twice, then coated in a film of memory I can’t quite wash off.

A face hovers in the periphery—a woman, maybe fifty, maybe older, with skin like wax and eyes the color of old bruises. She leans over my shoulder, her perfume equal parts gardenia and rot. “You’re almost there, Diana,” she murmurs. Her mouth never moves, but I hear the words inside my head. “Almost done, Dee.”

I keep typing. The keys clack under my nails. My reflection wobbles in the mirrored edge of the fume hood: my eyes look too large for my skull, cheeks hollowed, the split on my lip stitched and bruised. There’s an echo sphere on the bench beside me—smaller than the one Maven handed over, but identical in its geometry: a tangle of wires, a shell of translucent resin, inside it a black node that pulses in time with my heartbeat.

I reach for it, hand trembling. As my fingers close around the sphere, the dream skips, shuddering sideways.

Now I’m in a corridor. The walls pulse with warning lights, alarms shrieking. I’m running, hair streaming behind me, clutching the sphere to my chest. There’s blood on my lab coat, but I don’t know whose. Footsteps crash behind me, someone yelling “Stop her!” but I keep going, every stride a hammer blow to my ribs. At the end of the hallway is a door stamped “RESTRICTED”—I slam the override and tumble through, rolling to my feet in a cloud of white dust.

Inside is a nursery. The cribs are empty, but there’s a single teddy bear on the floor, soaked red. I want to scream, but I can’t. I cradle the sphere, pressing it to my sternum, willing it to do something—anything—to make the noise stop.

The world stutters again.

I’m back at a desk. My hands are smaller, the nails bitten raw. I’m scribbling notes in a blue-ruled notebook. The letters slant at a wild angle, frantic and desperate. Every page is filled with diagrams—maps of the Zone, cross-sections of Authority towers, lists of protocols annotated in red pen. The date in the upper right corner is wrong: it loops, resetting to the same day no matter how many pages I turn.

There’s a shadow standing in the doorway, but I refuse to look up. I keep writing, hand cramping, until the pen runs dry.

A hand drops onto my shoulder. It’s Kang’s hand—rough, scarred, familiar even in the dream. “You did good, Dee,” he says, but his voice is strange, warped, filtered through static.