Chapter Twenty-Eight
The alarm screams through the concrete corridor, red strobes painting everything in the rhythm of a heartbeat.
My weapon is still aimed at Dr. Reyes's center mass, but my peripheral vision tracks the new shadow at the end of the hall, gun raised with a steady hand that tells me she’s been holding firearms longer than I’ve been alive. Evelyn.
Kiera makes a sound beside me. Not a gasp. A fracture. Like something inside her sternum just split open. “Mom?” The word tears out of her, raw and young, as if she were that eight-year-old girl again.
Evelyn steps into the strobe light, and I see the changes sixteen years have carved into her.
She’s harder, leaner, but her eyes—the same grey as Kiera’s, the same storm—fix on her daughter with a hunger that makes my trigger finger itch.
“Weapons down,” Evelyn says. Her voice is smoky and gravelly. “Now.”
Dr. Reyes laughs, her voice a dry, clicking sound that scrapes against the concrete walls. “Evelyn,” she says almost fondly. You were supposed to wait in the extraction chamber.”
“I got bored,” Evelyn says, her gun tracking smoothly from Reyes to me, then back to the doctor. “And I don’t trust you with my daughter’s life. Not after you flooded Ward B with halothane last Tuesday.”
Cam’s voice is back in my ear, urgent and sharp. “Sterling! The east wing is breached. Six of them. They’re sweeping toward the basement stairwell. You have fifteen seconds before they cut off your exit.”
Fifteen seconds. Not enough time to process the ghost of Evelyn Hawthorne standing ten feet away.
Not enough time to understand why the woman who supposedly died sixteen years ago is holding a firearm like she’s been hunting in these tunnels for years.
“We’re going to Ward C,” I say, my voice cutting through the siren.
I grab Dr. Reyes’s arm, twisting her wrist until the tablet clatters to the concrete. “Open the vault. Now.”
“The mercenaries have kill orders,” Reyes gasps, her composure finally cracking. “They’ll incinerate the entire sub-basement to contain the evidence. You need me to disarm the…”
“You’re the fucking evidence,” Kiera snarls, the shock burned away, replaced by cold fury.
She presses her gun hard against Reyes’s temple.
“You’re the fucking evidence,” Kiera snarls.
She’s shaken off the shock, her own weapon pressed against Reyes’s temple.
“Open the damn door, or I'll paint the walls with you.” Evelyn moves. Fast. Too fast for a woman her age. She’s beside us in three strides.
“I’m the only one who can open Ward C without the secondary codes,” Evelyn says, her eyes locked on Kiera.
Not asking for permission. Stating a fact. ” Ten seconds.
The stairwell above us shudders. Heavy boots. “Sterling,” Kiera says. My name is a question, a plea, an order.
I make the choice. “Open it.”
Evelyn slaps her hand against the scanner. The vault door hisses as pressurized seals release. Beyond it, the corridor stretches into darkness, lined with those small, reinforced windows —the ones Cam said held the heat signatures.
Reyes lunges. Without thinking, I drive my elbow straight into her temple.
Bone meets bone with a sickening crack. She staggers, eyes glazed over, dazed and unsteady on her feet.
I grab her by the collar and drag her limp body into the vault.
Evelyn is already moving inside. Kiera covers our rear, her Glock trained back toward the stairwell, steady as stone.
“Cam!” My voice booms down the earpiece. “We’re going dark. Seal the east entrance. Loop the cameras to show us escaping west.”
“Copy,” Cam spits. “But, Sterling, those kids…they’re sedated. You can’t carry seventeen bodies out before…”
“We’ll figure it out.” I cut him off, the words coming out in a rush. “We’re not leaving them.”
The vault door begins to close. Through the narrowing gap, I see the first mercenary round the corner—night vision, suppressed rifle, face covered in black mesh.
He raises his weapon. Kiera fires before he has a chance.
The mercenary’s chest blooms red. He drops, the door sealing behind him.
The sirens muffle to a distant whine. The emergency lighting in the corridor is low and amber, casting long shadows across the floor.
“They’re in isolation cells,” Evelyn says.
She’s already moving down the corridor, her lavender dress absurd against the tactical environment.
“Wade was moving them to the incinerator at dawn.”
“You knew,” Kiera says. Her voice trembles with a violence I know well. “You knew they were going to burn them, and you were just…what? Fucking waiting here? Drinking tea?”
Evelyn stops, turning to face Kiera. “I was waiting for you,” Evelyn says softly.
“For both of you. The program has a kill switch for every facility. I needed Subject 001 and Subject 012 together to activate the failsafe. To burn it all down from the inside.” She looks at me, and there’s something ancient and knowing in her eyes.
But there is also something that doesn’t feel right.
“I needed the boy who survived Ward B. The one who killed my husband’s mercenaries when he was nine years old.
The one who’s been looking for my daughter ever since. ”
The words hit like a physical blow. My childhood. The blur of faces. The men in Wade’s employ who came to the facility to ‘evaluate’ me. The blood. I don’t remember, but my body does. “Open the cells,” I sneer.
Evelyn smiles. It’s Kiera’s smile, but sharper—colder, more predatory. “I thought you’d never ask.”
Above us, through ten feet of concrete and stone, the muffled percussion of breaching charges begins. We have minutes. Maybe less. Kiera looks at me, her grey eyes wide, trusting. Yours, my mind snarls. She’s yours. Get her out. Get them all out. “Ready?” she asks.
I rack my slide, chambering a fresh round. “Always, Thorn.”
Evelyn presses her hand to the first cell door; the lock disengages with a heavy clunk.
The first cell door swung inward. The girl inside—around fourteen, skin translucent from lack of sun—doesn’t run.
She doesn’t scream. She simply unfolds herself from the corner with a mechanical, broken grace that twists my stomach.
Her eyes find Evelyn, and she nods. Not relieved.
Conditioned. “Status?” I demanded, keeping my weapon trained back down the corridor toward the sealed vault door.
The breaching charges above us had stopped, which is worse than the noise.
“Sedated,” Evelyn says, her voice clinical as she checks the girl’s pupils with a penlight. “Tramadol and lorazepam. They can walk, but they won’t fight. They’ve been taught not to.”
Kiera pushes past me, her boots silent on the concrete.
She crouches in front of the girl, reaching out slowly.
The girl flinches—not from the movement, but from the contact, as if human touch were a voltage she wasn’t wired to handle anymore.
“Hey,” Kiera whispers softly. Her voice cracks, but she steadies it.
“I’m Kiera. I was here. Ward C, 2007. Do you understand?
” The girl blinks. Then, slowly, she lifts her left hand.
Four parallel scars run across her wrist. Self-inflicted, or something worse.
She touches Kiera’s cheek with a finger that trembles.
Almost as if to say, same song, different verse.
“Open the others now,” I order, dragging Dr. Reyes forward by her collar. She was limp, playing possum, but I could feel the tension in her neck, the calculation. “Now. Or I start shooting kneecaps, and you carry them.”
Instead, Evelyn moves to the second cell, then the third.
The locks disengage with heavy, hydraulic sighs.
The children emerge like ghosts. Some holding hands—pairs already bound by whatever hell they’d shared in the dark.
A boy with a shaved head and burn marks on his palms. Twin girls who moved in perfect, eerie synchronization.
One room holds six babies. The older children fill the narrow corridor, a silent, shambling mass of bruised knees and hospital gowns.
No one cries besides the babies. That was the worst part.
The silence of children who had learned that crying brought punishment.
My gaze drops to the smallest ones—six infants still whimpering in their cribs.
How the hell are we supposed to carry them out?
I glance at Kiera, her eyes meeting mine with the same question.
Kiera’s eyes flick to the infants, then back to me. Her posture straightens. “We carry them,” she says. “Two per person if we have to. Strap them to our chest with the vest. We move fast, and we don’t stop until we’re out. No one gets left behind.”
“Service tunnel.” Evelyn presses her palm against a panel at the end of the hall I’d assumed was solid rock.
It slides open, revealing a narrow passage of rough-hewn stone, older than the facility itself, smelling of wet earth and moss.
“It leads to the river. Two miles. Cold, but it’s outside the blast radius. ”
I grab her arm and spin her away from the children, my grip iron-tight. “What?”
Evelyn’s eyes meet mine without flinching.
“Wade built this place to disappear,” she says with a clinically cold voice.
“If unauthorized forces breach the facility, the incinerator doesn’t just burn the evidence; it destroys it.
It ignites the oxygen tanks in the medical wing.
The mountain becomes a crematorium in forty-five seconds. ”
“And you were going to tell us this when?” Kiera snarls, her weapon swinging toward her mom.