Chapter 12
Twelve
Magnus pressed his shoulder to the wall, finger indexed along his SIG’s frame, and watched Gunnar’s hand drop.
Stack up.
Bj?rn moved first, silent on the concrete, taking point. Astryde slotted in behind him without a sound, rifle tight to her shoulder, eyes already on the door ahead. Davis came third. Magnus filled the fourth spot, and he knew before his shoulder hit Davis’s back that he was half a beat late.
The corridor ahead was dim, the emergency lighting painting everything copper.
Somewhere deeper in the compound, voices of two, maybe three hostiles, carried down the hall, relaxed, unaware.
The brief had been clear. A facility this size had no good outcomes for a firefight.
Move through, locate the objective, extract without engaging.
Bj?rn’s fist went up.
Halt.
Magnus froze. He’d caught the signal this time. His heart was doing the slow, heavy work it did before a backburn, every beat a reminder that the margin for error here was zero.
Astryde slid past Bj?rn, checked the corner, and dropped her hand flat with her thumb out.
Clear left.
They moved. Bj?rn peeled, Astryde took point, Davis covered high.
Magnus tried to track the shift in his peripheral vision the way he’d read a fuel line in open country, but the rhythm was wrong.
His feet wanted the cadence of a crew moving through brush.
Theirs moved to something tighter, something he’d never trained into muscle.
He was a beat late through the pivot.
Gunnar’s hand tapped his shoulder once. Correction. Magnus adjusted without turning his head, fell into the right spot, and exhaled.
The corridor branched. Davis held at the junction, rifle up, and Bj?rn went left. Astryde stacked on him. Magnus took off right with Davis falling in behind him, which put him on point for the first time.
The doorway fifteen feet ahead was cracked open, a wedge of light spilling across the concrete. Voices inside — two, relaxed. One of them was laughing.
Magnus moved to the door, boots quiet, weapon up. Through the gap, he could see the edge of a table, the butt of a rifle resting across it, its owner tipped back in his chair with his hands behind his head. Non-threat. Magnus logged it and kept closing.
A shadow moved in the alcove to the left. The shot caught him in the chest before he registered the movement.
For a single disorienting second, his body believed it. Real impact, real drop, the sick jolt of having been hit. Behind him, two more cracks in fast succession, Gunnar grunting, and Davis’s rifle clattering against the wall.
The fail-buzzer blatted through the compound’s speakers, flat and cartoonish, cutting his legs out more effectively than any round.
“Rebel One,” Cooper’s voice came over comms, dry as sandpaper, “your stack is dead.”
Magnus turned.
Gunnar stood six feet behind him, sim rifle still up, one eyebrow cocked.
“You tunneled the room, eyes locked on the door. You never cleared your flank.” Gunnar said.
“I read the hallway as cleared.”
“It was cleared. The alcove wasn’t.”
Astryde came up from the left corridor, lowering her rifle. “From where I was standing, it looked artistic. Like a ballet.”
“A real short ballet,” Bj?rn said.
“Three seconds,” Davis confirmed, pulling his marker off his vest. “I counted.”
Magnus pulled the simmunition marker off his vest and looked at the smear of chalk dust on his palm. His heart was still running hot, the adrenaline not yet catching up with the fact that he was upright.
Heath came through the side door, sim rifle slung, grinning. “You walked right past him.”
“Past who?”
“Gavin.” Heath jerked his chin toward the corridor they’d cleared.
A second operator emerged from the utility room, rifle low.
Heath continued, “you haven’t met. He just got in from a job.”
Gavin lifted a hand. “Nothing personal.”
“Nothing personal,” Davis echoed flatly. “He says, having just murdered us.”
Cooper’s voice came back over comms. “Team, safe your weapons and take a break. Reset at twenty-one hundred. Nice movement, Rebel Four.”
Davis grinned. “Told you he likes me best.”
They drifted back toward the armory, falling into the loose formation of people who’d just burned through adrenaline together and were coming down the other side. Magnus pulled his magazine, cleared the chamber, and felt the slow drain of stress leaving his body through his hands.
Gunnar fell in beside him. Didn’t say anything for a stretch.
“You’re not bad,” Gunnar said finally, voice lower. “You haven’t had the same training as we have.”
“I got you killed.”
“In a sim.” Gunnar didn’t soften his response. “Now we know what to work on.”
Magnus looked at him.
Gunnar didn’t smile, but something eased in his shoulders. “We just need more practice. We’ve never run the five of us as a stack. Now we have.”
They reached the armory. Magnus locked the SIG in its case and stood for a second with his hands on the bench, letting the last of the adrenaline bleed out.
He should have gone to the shower. Should have grabbed food, a sanity check, a few minutes of wall-staring. Instead, he stood in the armory after his siblings had scattered and felt the thing he’d spent all day not thinking about come back up into the front of his head.
Grace.
She hadn’t been in the sim. Hadn’t been in the armory. Hadn’t crossed a hallway he’d walked down. He’d spent all day building distance between them like a control line, and the burn was still going. She was still over there somewhere, working. Alone.
He’d told himself the distance was for Oliver. For keeping his head clean.
He wasn’t sure he still believed it.
Magnus left the armory.
The command center sat two corridors and a stairwell away from the living quarters, tucked on the compound’s north side, where the air-handling equipment masked the noise from sensitive work.
Which also meant she hadn’t heard the sim.
Hadn’t heard the klaxon, the fail-buzzer, the banter in the halls afterward.
He wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or uneasy about that.
The command center door was propped open with a cable duct.
He stepped through.
Three of the wall monitors were still live, cascading diagnostic text in soft green. A fourth was paused on a schematic he didn’t recognize. The room was otherwise dim — emergency lighting only, no overheads — silent except for the hum of the cooling towers behind the server rack.
He’d gotten his siblings killed in rehearsal by not looking where it mattered. He wasn’t making that mistake twice in one night.
Grace sat at her console with her head down on her forearm.
Not sleeping. Not yet. The angle of her shoulders was wrong for sleep, like she’d put her head down for a second, and the second had turned into minutes. Her hand was still on the keyboard. A mug beside her elbow had to be eight hours cold.
Magnus stood in the doorway and looked at her for longer than was smart.
She’d been in those clothes yesterday. Her sleeve had a dried streak of creamer from the coffee he’d brought her. A single protein bar wrapper sat next to her keyboard.
She’d been running herself into the ground since he’d walked out on her that morning, and nobody had made her stop because nobody had been looking.
He’d been not-looking on purpose.
Magnus crossed the room. Made his boots heavier than he needed to, gave her the sound as a courtesy.
Grace stirred when he was three steps from her chair.
Her head came up, her hand moved to the keyboard in the same reflex, and for a beat, her eyes were unfocused enough that he could see through the mask she usually wore.
Exhaustion underneath, raw and close to the surface.
The shake he’d seen in her hands yesterday was still there.
Then she caught up to herself.
“Magnus.” The professional register snapped into place so fast he could almost hear it. “Did you need something? I’ve been running perimeter diagnostics and—”
“Grace.”
“—there’s an anomaly in the southeast relay I want to—”
“Grace. Stop.”
She stopped. Didn’t argue. Just looked at him, and she was too tired to get the mask all the way up. It came together patchy, with the fear still showing at the edges.
“When did you last sleep?” he asked.
She opened her mouth.
“A real answer,” he said.
Her throat worked. “I’ve been grabbing—”
“Grace.”
She closed her mouth. Looked at the screen. Didn’t look at him.
Magnus turned her chair away from the monitors.
“What are you doing?”
“You’re going to bed.”
“I can’t—”
“You can.”
“There are things that need—”
“They’ll be here when you wake up.”
“Magnus, I can’t sleep, there are—”
He put his hand on the back of her chair. Not touching her. Just close enough that she had to look at him.
“Tell me the thing,” he said. “The thing that’s keeping you in this room. The thing that’s more important than you being functional when we move on Patroclus.”
Her eyes flickered. Just for a second. The same flicker he’d seen in the server room. The same flicker he’d seen when she’d sealed her mask after the drone failure. The tell.
She had a thing.
She wasn’t going to tell him what it was.
He waited.
“There’s nothing,” she said finally, her voice soft, and it was a lie.
He let her tell it.
“Okay.” He stepped back from the chair. “Then there’s nothing keeping you here. Up.”
Grace stood.
She swayed. Caught herself on the edge of the console. Magnus didn’t move to steady her — she would have refused it — but he tracked the sway, noted how long it took her to find her balance.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Walk,” he said.
Surprisingly, she walked.
He followed her through the corridor to her quarters, close enough that if she fell, he’d catch her, far enough that she could pretend he wasn’t there. Neither of them spoke. The fluorescents buzzed. Her door came up on the right.
She stopped at the keypad and didn’t punch in the code.
“Thank you,” she said, not looking at him. “For not pretending I’m fine.”
Magnus’s chest did something complicated.
“I’m going to ask eventually.”
“I know.”
“I’m asking you to sleep first.”
She nodded.
He should have stepped back then. Should have done the smart thing, the disciplined thing, the thing that kept the lines sharp. Instead, he reached up slowly, slow enough to give her the whole trip to pull away, and tucked her hair behind her ear.
Grace’s eyes closed.
Her breath came out unsteady.
He wanted to kiss her with a force that felt structural. Something in his chest would fail if he didn’t have this. Her mouth. Her hands fisted in his shirt. The permission of her.
But her eyes were still closed. Still hiding.
His hand dropped.
“Get some sleep, Gracie,” he said. “I’ve got the watch.”
She looked up at him then. The nickname had slipped out before he could stop it. Her eyes caught on his, and for one unguarded second, she looked almost hurt by it. Then she looked away and opened her door.
She paused in the threshold with her back to him, her hand on the frame.
“Magnus.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know what to do with you.”
She stepped inside before he could answer. The door shut between them.
Magnus stood in the corridor.
He didn’t move for a long time.