Chapter 27
KRISTI
The launch panel watches me. That’s what it feels like, anyway.
A monolithic slab of cold luminite and pulsing light, spitting status alerts and biometric prompts in a steady, almost bored cadence.
Whoever designed this system knew nobody would ever get this far down.
They built it like a verdict with no appeal.
Triple-layer encryption.
Algorithmic locks swirling like fractals under glass.
My uncle’s biometric signature woven into the very foundation of the access code, like a ghost crouched in machine logic, sneering at anyone who might try to break it open.
I brace both hands on the console, try not to think about how slick my palms are getting with blood and sweat. My side throbs with every breath—hot, wet, pulsing to the plastic beat of the alarm howling somewhere above us.
It’s fine. I’ve coded under worse.
Okay, maybe not worse.
“Talk to me, Kristi,” Kenron’s voice rumbles over the concave hiss of a charging pulse pistol. He doesn’t turn when he says it. He’s fixed on the hatch, shoulders squared, every muscle ready to launch if someone breaks it open.
I don’t look back. Can’t.
“Fail-safe is engaged,” I say through gritted teeth. My fingers are flying—touch, press, drag—bypassing one encryption lattice after another. “The core’s running override algorithms I’ve only seen in deep council docs. Dennis doesn’t trust anyone.”
“Not even himself,” Kenron mutters.
He’s not wrong.
The third encryption layer unfurls before me, a black field of shifting code—an intellectual snarl designed to break lesser minds. I swipe a bloody finger against the shard I plugged in earlier. Its energy flares.
“Come on…” I whisper, breath fogging on the cold glass.
The fail-safe script is pregnant in the window, waiting, pulsing the same deep crimson as my wound beneath the tunic.
I route it through grid access instead of council mainline, forcing the code to scrape through an unregulated power relay. The screen flickers.
Accessing grid [Overcurrent]. Relays: 2. Confirm?
“Yes,” I hiss, jamming the enter command with the heel of my palm.
The whole console groans. Something behind the walls pops like a gut-shot capacitor.
The alarms above pitch higher.
“They know,” Kenron says. “They’re moving.”
“Stall them another minute,” I whisper. “I’m almost ready to kill it.”
He curses softly. I hear him adjust his stance. The door shudders.
I dump a final string of code like a bucket of gasoline, praying it burns. The kill command flickers at the top of the interface:
NANITE RELEASE PROTOCOL – ARMED
KILL SCRIPT AVAILABLE – WAITING EXECUTE
No time to savor it.
My vision swims for a moment when I blink, and I realize I haven’t breathed in nearly thirty seconds.
Sweat runs down my cheek, stinging the raw cut on my neck. My fingers tremble. I move them anyway.
I anchor the script to a forced derezzing node on the dispersal grid. If it works, the nanite logic collapses on itself. If it doesn’t, the system may just ignore the attempt and fire right past me.
The console chirps like it’s mocking me.
REDUNDANT VERIFICATION REQUIRED
ENTER BIOMETRIC TOKEN: DENNIS L. MONTANA
Of course.
I reach for the override pendant hanging inside my tunic. My chest feels like it’s closing in on itself. I press it to the input pad.
It scans. It scans.
ACCESS GRANTED.
His voice.
Slithering out of the speakers, slick and cold as dead water.
“You always were sentimental, Kristi.”
Time stops.
“To think,” Dennis continues, “you had every opportunity to succeed me. And here you are. Playing at revolution. Breaking things you don’t understand.”
My throat closes.
I don’t even look up. I just keep typing.
“You accepted a job built on illusions. You thought if you worked hard enough… followed the rules long enough… you could change things from within. A quaint idea. Almost touching.”
“You don’t get to talk to me,” I say.
“I think I do,” he replies, tone smooth as lacquer. “Because I taught you everything you know. How to analyze. How to adapt. How to bury a lie under seventeen layers of truth. You are what I built.”
I stop.
Finger hovering just above execute.
Then I speak—
“No,” I say. Steady. “I’m what you never saw coming.”
And I press it.
EXECUTING KILL COMMAND
KILL SCRIPT ROUTED >> GRID OvLd
RELAY FAILURE — 2/2
DISPERSAL NODE OFFLINE
The screen flashes bright—angry, warning red—and flickers back to life. Status updates race down the feed like shattering glass.
For one agonizing second—I think it’s failed.
Then the console flatlines.
PROTOCOL NEUTRALIZED
Above us, one of the emergency sirens dies in the middle of a blast.
Kenron exhales. I don’t hear it. I feel it in the air.
Dennis’s voice cuts off.
I lean on the console, every muscle shaking, the adrenaline crash hitting hard.
Outside, the plaza dims.
Not the soft, golden fade of twilight, not the romantic hush of dusk over Novaria’s spires—this is different. The banners ripple in an unnatural silence. The lights flicker once, twice, then cut out with a mechanical sigh that echoes all the way down to my bones.
For a second, the world seems to hold its breath.
The deployment canisters—lined in a perfect semicircle beneath the platform like teeth in a steel jaw—don’t open.
Instead, they hiss once, then stutter, clicking and cycling like confused machinery.
Above us, the emergency drones, sleek and humming and hungry, begin to drop from the sky.
One spirals downward in a lazy corkscrew, landing harmlessly in the middle of a vendor’s stall.
The crowd doesn’t understand at first. I see it in the tilt of their heads, the confused laughter, the ripple of whispered questions. But then a child screams. A vendor shouts something in fractured Vakutan. Panic moves fast—always has. People begin to run.
I slide to the floor, my back to the console, and I sob.
Ugly, shuddering sobs that tear out of my throat like something dying.
I bury my face in my arms and let it hit me—we did it.
Against every odds. Against every goddamn coded layer, every twist of my uncle’s cruelty.
We stopped it. No one’s blood is soaking this plaza.
No nanite fog is curling into alien lungs.
No sterilization, no mass death. Just confusion. Chaos.
But not genocide.
A warm weight thuds beside me—it’s one of the console relays, burnt out completely. Smoke curls from the edges, acrid and sharp. My side throbs. My body’s screaming for rest, for medical attention, maybe even sleep.
And then I hear it.
Gunfire.
Not security. Not drones. Not warning shots.
Kenron.
I snap up so fast I almost black out. The room spins.
My vision narrows to a tunnel of urgency and adrenaline.
The console’s glow blurs at the edges. I push off it, stagger to the emergency rack where the guards had stored backup arms. My fingers wrap around the first weapon I can grip—a short-barreled sidearm with a scorched grip and two confirmed charges left.
It’ll do.
My legs scream as I run. The stairwell out of the hub is narrow and steep. Every step is a jolt through my spine. My breath comes in short, wet gasps. Somewhere above me, people are screaming. The crowd is moving, shoving, spilling like water trying to find the lowest point.
Gunfire again.
It echoes off the plascrete walls, sharp and final.
Don’t you dare die on me.
I burst through the stairwell door just as a pulse round hits the far wall, sending shards of plas-glass raining down. The chaos is total now. The plaza’s become a living tide of bodies. Alien, human, hybrid—no one cares anymore. Everyone’s running.
And in the middle of it, fighting like a myth—
Kenron.
His hair’s matted with sweat, his ceremonial robes stripped down to bloodstained layers. His shock staff is broken in half, one piece clutched in his left hand like a jagged blade. He’s bracing himself against the stage support, three Earth First enforcers surrounding him.
One lunges.
Kenron sidesteps, catches the enforcer’s wrist, twists until something cracks, and slams the shard-end of his staff into the man’s throat.
The second one fires.
I scream, “Kenron!”
He turns.
That’s all the hesitation the shooter needs.
The round clips Kenron’s side—he staggers, grunts, but stays standing. His gaze finds mine across the square, and something raw, something furious and beautiful, burns behind his eyes.
He shouts, “MOVE!”
I drop to one knee and fire.
The shot hits the second enforcer square in the chest. His armor absorbs most of it, but the kinetic force throws him backward into the support beam. He slumps and doesn’t get up.
The third turns to me.
He’s fast. Already raising his weapon. Already moving.
But Kenron is faster.
He surges forward, rams his elbow into the enforcer’s jaw, grabs the man’s gun, and wrenches it sideways with a snap of metal and bone. The weapon discharges into the air—blue arcs sparking over the crowd.
Then it's over.
Kenron stands, swaying slightly, blood soaking his side. He looks down at the bodies around him, then back at me.
I run to him, and he catches me like I’m air and fire all at once.
“I told you to stay down,” he mutters, voice rough.
“You shot a guy with a staff,” I reply, breathless. “You don’t get to lecture me about reckless.”
We laugh. It sounds like dying.
Then I bury my face in his shoulder and sob again—because I can’t not.
He holds me, tight, while the square empties and the sirens finally begin to wail in earnest. Drones circle above like vultures realizing the feast was denied.
“They’re going to come hard now,” I whisper. “He’ll use this.”
Kenron nods.
“He always does.”