Chapter 56
FIFTY-SIX
The surveillance screen froze mid-flinch.
Lucía’s body—naked, trembling—was caught in a sick stutter of pixels, her face twisted in pain, lips pulled back in a silent scream.
Her thighs were blistered red where the metal chair had burned into her skin.
Smoke shimmered faintly in the corner of the frame.
Ryan’s pulse kicked so hard he thought he might black out.
Javier knelt beside her, blow torch still hissing in his hand, blue flame licking the edge of the steel frame as casually as if he were searing crème br?lée.
Ryan moved.
The chair scraped back, the legs shrieking against concrete. He didn’t hear it. Didn’t hear the clatter of the fallen radio, or the way his own heart sounded like a war drum in his chest.
He was already out the door, sprinting. Because that wasn’t a video. That wasn’t replayed footage. That was happening.
Right now.
The world came to Lucía back in pieces.
Pain, first.
Her nerves fired in waves, heat flaring along her thighs, her back, her wrists. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. The room still smelled like her own burnt flesh.
She blinked but saw nothing. Her eyes were open. It just didn’t matter. A second later, light stabbed through her skull. The overhead bulb. Still on. Still humming.
She was still in the chair.
Lucía turned her head a few inches and screamed. Just once. Short. Sharp. The sound of her skin tearing away from the hot metal where her shoulder had fused to the backrest.
Then silence again. Her heart hammering in her chest. Her breath coming fast.
She looked down. The sides of her thighs were blistered—burned in the shape of the metal where the heat had radiated through. Her left hip bore the ugly red kiss of the frame. Her wrists were raw, the skin slick with blood where the zip-ties had bit into them during the convulsions.
He’d only been gone a few minutes. Or an hour. She didn’t know. There was no time here.
Lucía pressed her head back and closed her eyes.
Through the fog of pain and thirst and hunger and exhaustion, she saw Ryan. His handsome face, his strong jaw. Eyes so blue they were almost clear. He didn’t smile often, but the few times he had had been breathtaking.
He’d nearly been hers. Just like Mateo had. But for a trick of fate, a quirk of the universe, a you go left and I go right moment. If only she could have had one more go-around, one more chance to see him, she’d tell him she loved him, and that she’d known it since he’d first kissed her.
But there were no go-arounds. Real life didn’t get a replay. All she could do was picture him in her mind, her Mills and Boon cowboy, and say it in her head.
I love you, Ryan Inglis.
In her head, he spoke back, but what he said wasn’t what a Mills and Boon cowboy would say. Nothing like that at all.
In her head, he said, Plastic weakens in heat. It gets brittle. A little leverage, it pops.
She jerked upright in the chair as the memory hit her.
A tremor ran through her arms as she tested the tie on her left wrist. The plastic stretched like hard taffy but it didn’t give.
She didn’t have the leverage that Ryan had, nor the brute strength.
She rotated her hand, slow and deliberate, grinding blood and sweat into the tie.
The pain was so intense it was almost hallucinatory.
But it wasn’t everything. Not anymore. Not when rage was simmering behind her ribs, hot and clean and merciless.
Her fingers clenched. Twitched. Moved.
“Come on,” she whispered.
With a final twist and pull, her left hand slipped free with a sick, wet sound. Her forearm flopped forward, nerves screaming as it fell slack.
She bit down on her own shoulder to keep from crying out.
Then the other hand. Then the feet.
By the time she collapsed to the floor, it wasn’t victory she felt. It was ignition.
She lay still for a second, cheek against cold concrete. Her lungs burned with every breath. Her body wept from ten different wounds.
When she looked up, she saw her laptop sitting open on the dirty table, its screen dimmed but still alive.
Lucía dragged herself toward it, inch by inch. Every scrape of her palms left smears of blood on the concrete. Her body was an instrument of pain—burned, blistered, trembling—but her mind had gone diamond-sharp.
When she reached the table, she clutched at the edge and pulled herself upright, using her good arm. Her breath came in gasps. The scent of scorched skin and hot metal clung to her.
The screen flickered awake at her touch.
Lines of code shimmered faintly across the monitor: encrypted strings, her old algorithms looping endlessly, waiting for the final key.
Lucía’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. They were shaking, slick with sweat and blood, but she found the keys by muscle memory. The phrase came to her all at once, like breath returning after drowning:
Tr3mbl_n0_c41g4_s0la.
She typed it slowly, carefully, each keystroke a small act of rebellion. Then she hit Enter.
The laptop hummed. The screen flared white, then filled with a torrent of data: names, transfers, coded transactions. The ledger was assembling itself.
For a heartbeat, she simply stared at it.
Then she saw the final prompt appear:
> Upload to distributed mirrors? [Y/N]
Her finger hovered. And she pressed Y.
The progress bar shot across the screen. Her fail-safes came online, one after another, a cascade of systems she’d built in secret over years—each one relaying fragments of the data through hidden servers, secure clouds, anonymous networks.
DATA PUBLISHED TO MIRRORS: 12/12.
It was done.
The silence that followed felt enormous. Her whole body shook, not from fear this time, but from release. The pain was still there, burning deep, but beneath it was something else.
Freedom.
Lucía exhaled. It came out as a laugh, hoarse and wet. She reached forward and closed the laptop with both hands.
Then she slid to the floor, her back against the table leg, breathing through the pain. The room smelled of burnt flesh and blood and victory. She whispered the phrase once more, softly, tasting the ash of it on her tongue. Trembling doesn’t make a leaf fall alone.
And for the first time in her life, she believed it.
Ryan’s bootfalls were muffled, but the corridor was quiet enough to make every breath feel like a cymbal crash.
He reached a corner. Paused. Listened.
Nothing.
Then, footsteps. Soft. Padded.
Ryan ducked into a shallow recess in the wall just as a soldier passed. Black fatigues. Sidearm holstered. No helmet.
He passed by without spotting Ryan, and without Ryan having to waste anymore of his precious bullets. Somewhere ahead was the hangar. He could feel it in his bones. And inside that…
Lucía.
The silence after upload didn’t last. There were bootsteps outside the door, slow and heavy.
Lucía tensed. Someone was coming to check on her. She got back to her feet, burns stretching like fire across her skin. She needed a weapon now.
The table was littered with industrial odds and ends but her eyes went straight to a metal tray lined with what looked like surgical tools. Scissors. Forceps. A scalpel, sharp and bright, fresh out of its packaging.
Javier’s next instruments of persuasion.
She picked up the blade. Behind her, the footsteps got louder, closer. Lowering herself to the ground, she ducked around the side of the table, blade in her left hand.
The lock clicked. The door opened.
A man stepped in—bored, distracted, adjusting his walkie. He looked like a grunt. One of Phalanx’s nameless bastards.
Lucía didn’t lunge. She waited, coiled like wire, letting him approach, letting him see her naked, bloodied body crouched beside the table.
He leaned in—
She struck.
The blade plunged up beneath the shelf of his ribs. He gasped. She yanked sideways. He went down hard, gurgling.
She followed him to the floor, hand over his mouth, eyes locked on his as the light drained out. When it was done, she rolled off him, chest heaving.
His gun was still holstered. With trembling hands, she took it and placed it on the tray.
Then she quickly stripped his shirt, his boots, his pants.
Every movement sent sparks of pain through her whole body, but she managed to shove feet into his pants, trying not to notice how they were still warm from his body.
She had to roll the waistband over several times to make them stay up, and roll up the sleeves of the shirt, but at least she was covered.
The boots were way too big, so she jammed her feet into his thick socks instead.
They would provide both padding and muffle her footsteps.
Then she picked up his pistol, and stepped through the door, dressed in the borrowed skin of a soldier.