Chapter 45 She Can Scream Into The Void
SHE CAN SCREAM INTOTHE VOID
Love Is A Weapon - Letdown
Nightshade
Steel whispers against the whetstone.
I told Valentine we would need weapons to get Kayla back, and thankfully he obliged.
The warehouse hums around me – bodies pretending to sleep, silence pretending to be peace.
Rain claws at the tin roof, steady as a dying clock.
Ghost mutters to someone who doesn’t exist. Honey turns on his cot and grinds his teeth.
Bones paces ten feet like he’s trying to wear a door into the floor.
Snow hums that child’s tune, softer now, because even he understands he’s closer to being killed than laughed at.
Hatchet is still but not sleeping.
We are not built to wait.
I lay my blades out in order – not because I need them, but because order keeps my hands from becoming the problem. There are ampoules too, lined like glass teeth, each one a promise of something irreversible.
Hatchet broke the fragile shape of ‘control’ earlier. The sound of pipe on bone still echoes behind my eyes. I should have stopped him sooner. I knew he was going to snap, but I didn’t. Maybe because I understood.
A breath shifts behind me.
“Couldn’t sleep?” Bones.
I don’t turn. “Didn’t try.”
He steps into the edge of the light, eyes sunken, the kind of tired that makes men reckless. “Branson called,” he mutters.
My body goes still. “Now?”
“Brief. No coordinates. East ping again. Legacy band. He’s tracing it.”
“How long?”
“Hours.” He shrugs. “Maybe a day.”
“Hours I can work with.” A day I can’t.
Valentine’s phone buzzes across the room, again. Seytan. Again. He lets it ring out. The sound drills into the quiet.
“She’s not going to stop,” Bones points out, eyes on Valentine.
Valentine’s voice is dry. “She can scream into the void.”
“Containment’s just a slower kind of murder,” I reply.
Valentine looks at me like I’m a problem he hasn’t decided whether to solve or use. “Then we need to hurry up and find her before Seytan does.”
I smile without warmth. “Working on it.”
Bones shifts. “Snow’s been near the doors. Near the radios. Near anything that might turn into an exit.”
“You think he’s feeding someone?” I ask.
“I think he’s losing it,” Bones replies. “But losing it can still be a choice.”
Outside, thunder crawls along the horizon. Ghost whimpers into the dark. Hatchet sits against the far wall, eyes open, fingers twitching like they remember the pipe.
If Branson doesn’t come through soon, one of us snaps again.
Maybe this time it’s me.
“Bones…” I finally look at him. “When Branson calls back – anything solid – you come straight to me.”
Bones nods once. “You’ll be first.”
He doesn’t make a promise out of it. Bones doesn’t do vows. He does liabilities. Debts. Leverage.
He turns away and the warehouse swallows him back into its dim geometry.
I sit with the knives a moment longer than I need to. The whetstone drags its whisper down steel. It’s a sound I understand. It’s a sound that obeys. Rain keeps worrying the roof. Somewhere in the dark, Ghost’s voice flutters and breaks against itself.
Hatchet doesn’t move. Snow does – always. Honey shifts like a caged thing.
Valentine’s phone buzzes again and goes unanswered.
I set the blade down, clean, aligned with the others, and stand. The implant aches at the base of my skull like an invisible scar that never fully settles. A reminder threaded through nerve: behave.
I don’t.
Not in my head.
In my head I’m already moving east, already peeling the world apart until it gives me what I want.
I pace off the room’s edges instead. I count breath. I count heartbeats. I count how long it takes Snow to stop humming when Hatchet’s stare catches him and how long before he starts again, quieter, to prove he can.
Time doesn’t pass.
It accumulates.
The call comes when the building is at its most silent.
Not morning. Not night. That thin grey in-between where even the rain sounds tired.
The burner rings once and Bones answers before it can hit twice.
“Branson,” he says, voice flat.
Static. Then Branson’s voice, all wire and sleep deprivation. “I’ve got a direction. Not a pin.”
Bones’s eyes flick to me immediately.
He doesn’t hesitate.
He crosses the warehouse to where I’m standing and hands me the phone without ceremony.
“Talk,” Bones says into the space between us, and steps back just enough to watch everyone at once.
I bring the phone close.
“Say it,” I tell Branson.
“East coast,” Branson says. “Legacy infrastructure. Off-books medical site. Mostly underground. Paper trail scrubbed after 2012 but the payments didn’t stop. Something’s still drawing power.”
My grip tightens.
“Coordinates,” I say.
“Not over this line,” Branson snaps. “Not clean enough. You want them, you’ll have to meet a drop or you’ll have to let my tech send through a burst that could light you up like a bonfire.”
Valentine lifts his head at that, listening like a man hearing the words surveillance and exposure and tasting blood.
“How long?” I ask.
Branson exhales. “Hours. If the relay doesn’t go dark. Someone’s smothering the signal. It spikes, then gets blanketed.”
“Maybe someone else who knows what that frequency means.”
I hear Ghost’s breath hitch from the corner. Like the word frequency has teeth.
Branson continues, faster now. “One word kept repeating in the noise. Ark.”
Bones’s gaze goes razor-sharp. “Define ‘Ark’.”
“Don’t know,” Branson says. “Could be a codename, project tag, internal marker. I’m digging. Don’t move blind.”
I smile without showing teeth. “Too late.”
Branson swears. “Graves—”
The line stutters. Static chews the edges.
“Graves,” Branson repeats, voice suddenly low and urgent. “Listen to me. If you sprint at the first breadcrumb, you’ll hit the trap and you’ll deserve it. Hold position until I—”
The call dies.
Silence collapses back into the room.
For a heartbeat, no one moves.
Then the warehouse explodes into motion.
Honey’s shoulders come up like he’s readying for impact. Ghost pushes his palms into his temples, breathing shallow. Snow laughs once, thin and bright, like tension is a joke he’s trying to swallow. Hatchet’s eyes flick to me – one clean look, nothing else – and in that look there’s go.
Valentine stands, posture tightening. “We don’t even know what it is yet.”
“We know enough,” I say.
“You know a word,” Valentine snaps. Soft voice, steel wire under it. “You know a direction. That’s not intel. That’s bait.”
“It’s more than we had,” Honey says, and his voice is too calm for the violence under it.
Ghost swallows. “Ark,” he whispers. “That’s what they called the old holding sites. The government dumps. Where they sent the unfinished projects.” His eyes flick to Bones, then to me. “Experiments like us.”
Valentine’s jaw tightens. “Those were shut down.”
Ghost gives a small, broken laugh. “Sure they were.”
The air goes thick.
Valentine and I look at each other across it.
He wants control.
I want her.
Neither of us gets what we want without the other – yet.
“You used the term yourself. When you were baiting Seytan. You said she failed to remove Kayla from the Arks’ memories. We’re the Arks. What is Project Marrow?”
“We don’t have time for this,” Valentine snaps.
Bones steps between us before the friction sparks into something irreversible. He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t have to.
“Enough,” Bones says.
He slams a knife into the table – not at anyone, not a threat, just to break the room’s static. The sound snaps through the warehouse like thunder.
“We are not moving until we have something you can’t misread,” Bones says. “Branson’s tracing. He said hold position before the line cut. So we hold.”
My jaw ticks.
Bones meets my gaze. “But we prepare like we’re leaving in ten minutes.”
Honey nods once.
Valentine exhales through his nose, annoyed but not stupid. “I can run searches. Black-site records east of here. Old procurement channels. Anything that still generates invoices.”
“Do it,” Bones says.
“And we need transport ready,” Honey adds. “Not later. Now.”
Valentine’s eyes flick briefly to his phone, face-down on the desk like a suppressed heartbeat. “It’s being handled.”
Snow swings a leg over a crate and grins. “Lovely. We’re leaving on a bedtime story and a religious vessel. Love that for us.”
Hatchet’s head turns just enough that the joke dies mid-breath.
Snow’s grin thins. He looks away first.
Good.
Hours pass like something viscous.
No one sleeps. Not properly. Bodies sag. Minds grind. The warehouse becomes smaller, as if the walls are inching in on our ribs.
Valentine disappears into the adjoining office and starts making calls in a voice designed to soothe bureaucracy. He comes back with a list and a look in his eyes that says he’s walking a knife edge.
Bones maps the floor with pacing, stops, paces again. Always listening for the phone.
Honey counts supplies we don’t officially have. Ghost tries to anchor himself in the present by naming objects: crate, light, door, breath. Hatchet checks straps, latches, the chain on the shutter, the weakness in the back door hinge. Methodical. Silent.
Snow…Snow watches.
Not the room. Not us.
The door.
Over and over.
Like he’s waiting for a cue.
I file it away.
Then Valentine returns with his coat damp and his expression carefully blank.
“Seytan’s not just calling,” he says. “She’s moving.”
Bones looks up. “How do you know?”
Valentine doesn’t meet my eyes when he answers. “Because I know how she operates. And I have a guy on the inside.”
“Containment,” Bones says.
Valentine nods once. “In her language: salvage and sterilise.”
Honey’s mouth goes flat. “No survivors.”
Valentine’s jaw tightens. “Not if she can help it. She doesn’t want Kayla.”
My blood goes cold and hot at once. “Then we don’t wait.”
Bones holds my gaze. “We wait for coordinates or we die chasing a decoy.”
“I don’t care,” I say.
“I do,” Bones replies, and there’s no moralising in it – just strategy. “Because if we die, she wins by default.”