Chapter 23
Twenty-Three
The blast doors shuddered, then began to rise.
Everybody moved at once.
Davis came off the wall with his rifle up. Gunnar turned toward the widening gap, tension pulling hard through his shoulders. Bj?rn shoved himself upright, tablet already in hand, while Tiikaan stepped silently into position near the rear of the vault.
Magnus grabbed Grace’s terminal.
The casing was warm from constant use, the edges worn smooth beneath his fingers. The screen flickered once as the door lifted higher, lines of active processes continuing to crawl across the display.
No countdown now.
Just movement.
Ghost cycles rerouting camera feeds. Patrol offsets shifting in real time. Corridor windows opening and closing as the facility slowly tried to reassert control around the damage Grace had done to it.
The steel door locked into place overhead with a heavy metallic clank.
Nobody rushed the opening.
Davis checked the corridor first, rifle tracking methodically through the empty stretch of fluorescent light beyond the vault.
The hall looked exactly the same as it had before lockdown—clean concrete, exposed conduit lines, humming overhead lights—but Magnus knew better than to trust normal-looking things.
Especially now.
Especially anything Grace had touched.
The terminal flashed amber in his hands. A side corridor pulsed briefly, then vanished from the route map.
“She’s rerouting us,” Bj?rn murmured, leaning close enough to see the screen. “Or she already did.”
Magnus stared at the changing layout for half a second, then nodded once. “Move.”
He took point.
The team flowed out behind him automatically, years of training and instinct taking over where conversation left off. Magnus moved quickly but not recklessly, pace adjusting to the shifting data under his thumb the same way he’d once adjusted crews against changing wind conditions on a fire line.
Timing. Spacing. Momentum.
Same instincts. Different disaster.
The first intersection appeared ahead.
Magnus slowed, watching the terminal update. A security route shifted one corridor east. Camera coverage blinked out for three seconds, then returned.
“Cross now,” he said quietly.
They moved through fast and tight before the blind spot closed again.
Nobody relaxed afterward.
Not Davis. Not Gunnar. Not even Bj?rn and Bj?rn trusted systems more than people.
Every successful corridor felt less like safety and more like deeper commitment.
They were moving through Patroclus on Grace’s route, trusting Grace’s code, trusting that the woman who had sealed them in a vault hadn’t also built them a perfect funnel on the way out.
The possibility sat heavy behind every step.
Ahead, the corridor narrowed into a geothermal service passage lined with massive insulated pipes. Heat radiated through the concrete walls in damp waves. Condensation dripped steadily from overhead joints and splashed against the floor.
The terminal flickered.
Magnus held up a fist instantly.
The team stopped.
Footsteps echoed faintly somewhere beyond the next junction.
Two guards crossed the far opening in conversation, rifles hanging low. One laughed quietly at something the other said. The sound carried strangely in the enclosed corridor.
Magnus watched the terminal.
The patrol markers shifted.
“Wait,” he murmured.
The guards disappeared around the corner. A route line pulsed green.
“Move.”
They crossed the junction seconds before another security door hissed open farther down the hall.
Davis exhaled under his breath once they cleared it. “Okay. I officially hate this place.”
“That makes one of us,” Bj?rn muttered.
The tension cracked just enough for Gunnar to bark out a short, humorless laugh.
Magnus kept moving.
The terminal updated continuously in his hand now, adapting to changing patrol paths and system recoveries.
Twice, corridors vanished from the route entirely before they reached them.
Once, Magnus had to redirect the team through a maintenance stairwell when security doors locked down ahead of schedule.
Each reroute tightened the space behind Magnus’s sternum. Whatever he was feeling, it wasn’t fear. It was the slow build of recognition.
Grace hadn’t built a static escape plan. She’d built something adaptive. Something alive enough to keep responding after she was gone.
Sub-level 2 signage appeared ahead just as the terminal flickered hard enough to nearly go black.
Then Magnus’s earpiece exploded with static.
“Rebel One, come in. Rebel One, do you copy?”
Rafe.
The sheer panic in his voice stopped everybody cold.
Magnus keyed his mic immediately. “We copy.”
The sound Rafe made was half relief, half fury. “Oh, thank God. I’ve been trying to raise you for twenty minutes. What the heck is going on over there?”
They pushed forward again while Magnus spoke, moving through another corridor intersection as the terminal redirected them toward an auxiliary maintenance route.
“Grace bailed,” Magnus said, cutting left as the terminal rerouted them again. “But she left us an out.”
There was a sharp burst of typing on the other end.
“An out?” Rafe sounded halfway between furious and awed. “Magnus, she left you a heck of a lot more than an out.”
Gunnar’s head snapped toward Magnus.
Rafe kept talking before anybody could interrupt.
“Ten minutes ago, a locator beacon started flashing on my screen, and my monitors exploded with file after file opening.” Rafe gave a short, disbelieving laugh.
“She sent a massive encrypted dump. Schematics, patrol routes, annotated blueprints, probable holding locations for Oliver, extraction timing—Magnus, she practically built the operation for us.”
The team traded looks while they moved. The mission wasn’t over. Nothing about Grace’s silence said safe. But the way the corridors kept clearing in front of them had begun to mean something.
“I sent Cooper updated extraction coordinates,” Rafe continued. “You’re no longer heading back to base.”
Static crackled.
Then Cooper’s voice slammed across comms over the roar of engine noise and ocean wind.
“Rebel One, this is Cooper. I’m in position at the secondary extraction point. You’re cutting it close, so I’d appreciate it if you people started hauling—”
The line cut briefly in static.
“—serious butt.”
That almost earned another laugh out of Gunnar.
Almost.
Magnus glanced down at the terminal again as another route adjusted beneath his hand. The screen reflected pale light across his knuckles while Grace’s code kept carving openings through the facility ahead of them.
Ahead, alarm lights flickered once along the ceiling before stabilizing back to white.
“Systems are coming back online,” Rafe warned. “Whatever she did to them is collapsing.”
“Then we move faster,” Magnus said.
Nobody argued.
The team surged forward together through the next corridor, boots striking concrete in sharp controlled rhythm. Magnus called direction changes as they came, adjusting pace instinctively while the terminal fed him collapsing windows and shifting blind spots.
“Left here,” Magnus said.
They cut hard around the next corridor bend.
“Hold.”
The team flattened into shadow while a patrol crossed ahead.
“Now move.”
The cadence settled into his bloodstream quickly, familiar in a way he hadn’t expected. Not the facility. Not the mission.
Responsibility.
People trusting him to get them through something alive.
They reached the lava tube access just as security shutters slammed closed somewhere behind them with a deep metallic boom.
Bj?rn glanced back. “That seems bad.”
“It is bad,” Astryde said, then, after a beat, “She was always the plan.”
Magnus looked at her.
Astryde kept moving through the tunnel, rifle up, expression unreadable.
But she wasn’t arguing anymore.
Ahead, the lava tube opened into darkness, leading back to the surface. Behind them, Patroclus was sealing itself shut piece by piece as Grace’s false corridors collapsed under returning system control.
Magnus tightened his grip on the terminal one last time before slipping it into his vest.
Then he looked at his family. “Let’s go get our people back.”