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How much time had been stolen? Each memory, a chunk of my life chiseled away. Time I could have had with Angel. With Ivan. Even with Grandpa.

Rage filled me, something dark and cold. The kind that settled into my bones like a curse winding into a ritual explosion. The net coiled around us, filling with floating dots of my broken past, all strung to one strand, mine. And that glowing thread, fraying and thin, led off into the ether as an eternal tether, punctuated with a thousand scars.

The weave rippled around me, engulfing all the lost snippets of myself as it curled around me like a cocoon. Restoring lost pieces of my life in dizzying blocks until I felt myself hit a snag, and came face to face with the changeling.

45

ANGEL

The magic sweeping through the house felt suffocating for a long heartbeat. I realized it was the sheer volume of the motes, fragments, as Jude thought of them, returning. He and Remi swirled with magic in colors I couldn’t begin to focus on.

“This better not liquify his brain,” Ezra grumbled from beyond the doorway, and I knew he was talking about Remi, not Jude.

“Angel Mao.” A deep voice came from a loudspeaker outside. Everything else had gone eerily silent, and I hadn’t even noticed until that moment. “Come out with your hands up, and instruct your team to follow one by one.”

My gaze met Victor’s.

Phelps.

“We can distract them,” Wade offered.

“I’d offer to set up a bomb or something to put them off,” Bobby added, “but they’re between us and the vehicles.”

Remi and Jude were locked in magic, and I wasn’t about to let my team face them in my place.

“You guys stay in here,” I commanded. “I’ll go out.”

“What’s to stop them from just shooting you?” Ezra asked.

I waved at my useless arm. With the motes pulled from it, now that they’d returned to Jude rather than protecting me, the fade was spreading. Numbness trickled through my entire side. “Nothing. But what do they gain?”

“Control of the situation?” Ezra’s voice was sharp. “You in a body bag?”

Unless Jude recovered his body, I was headed there anyway. Better a bag than Erlik’s larder to rot as he gnawed on my soul.

Victor let me pass, but the guys stood in the hallway like a wall.

I pushed past them, one good hand raised, the other hanging useless at my side. The floor groaned under my weight, each step echoing through the hollow house, as though the merge had damaged something structurally. I could feel the team behind me, their worry, their tension, their barely contained rage, but I didn’t look back. They hadn’t listened to me either, sticking close despite my silence, their footsteps a dull chorus at my back.

At least the merge wasn’t getting worse.

I reached the front door and stood carefully to the side before pulling it open. “Phelps!” I shouted, keeping myself framed in the threshold without stepping out. They could shoot through the walls if they wanted. The question was simple: did they want to use me, or put me down?

“Mao,” Phelps answered, his voice flat.

“What’s the long game?” I asked.

“Depends on you.”

I didn’t believe that for a second. They’d never wanted me to leave the military. I’d bargained my freedom with the fae, offering them a warrior in exchange, should they need me. Now that Xavier had taken that burden, had the fae undone my release from the military and Phelps was just coming to collect?

Whatever they thought being a Bastion had made me, they wanted my magic. Probably Jude’s too, and we were tied, so bonus for them. But the military’s calculus had always been brutally simple, they needed either my ability, or my death. Both equaled their control, and not mine.

I raised my one good arm and stepped out into the sharp night air. Floodlights seared my vision, and a dozen BearCats lined the street, their headlights casting long, distorted shadows across the lawn, shapes that didn’t move quite right, that pooled in ways light shouldn’t allow. Maybe the merge had spread wider than I’d thought.

Dozens of soldiers stood in formation behind ballistic shields, rifles raised like I was some kind of troll about to hurl cars at them. Some had glowing armbands of marked variants, most didn’t. All wore the same unreadable mask. Resolve.

I locked my gaze on Phelps at the center of it all.