Chapter 5
ADA
They come at dawn.
Not Brother Lief's delegation—Ordained soldiers, twenty of them, in dark tactical gear instead of white cloaks. The gilded bloom on their chest plates is the only marker. They hit the eastern gate simultaneously with a signal jammer that kills our comms network in the first thirty seconds.
I'm on the wall when the first charge hits.
The percussive slam of it travels through the concrete and into my chest—metal on metal, the eastern gate shuddering in its frame, the sharp reports of the breaching charges they've placed on the hinges.
Concrete dust rains from the overhead beams in fine gray clouds that taste like chalk when I breathe through it.
My body is moving before my brain catches up. Blade in hand. Boots on the parapet.
"Gate watch, hold the breach! Formation C, staggered retreat if the gate fails!"
My voice carries over the chaos. It always does. That's the thing about training for four years—when the real thing comes, the training is louder than the fear.
The gate holds for forty minutes. My fighters—three on each side of the breach point, blades out, using the concrete channeling to force the Ordained into single-file approach—buy the evacuation time it needs.
They hold the line the way I taught them: rotating, covering, the front fighter pressing while the second recovers.
Renna is at the front. Her pivot is clean—tight, fast, the blade coming through the turn exactly where it needs to be. Something in me is fiercely glad.
Dov has the civilians moving through the west corridors, down to the sub-levels. The plan works the way plans work: imperfectly, with adjustments, with things going wrong in places nobody predicted and going right in places nobody expected.
The signal jammer cuts our coordination at the forty-minute mark. Without comms, the defense fragments. The gate watch splits—Renna's group falling back to the west block, my group cut off from the retreat path by a second Ordained squad that came through the roof access.
The roof access. I spent six months fortifying the roof access.
Beck's information didn't just buy them Petra. It bought them my security map.
I take the harder route. Six civilians behind me—three adults, two children, one elderly male who moves faster than I expect—and I'm cutting a path through the middle towers, floor by floor, using the stairwells and maintenance corridors I've memorized over four years.
The Ordained are behind us. I can hear their boots on the concrete, the controlled communication of a trained squad. They're not rushing. They're herding. They know the building better than they should. I know why.
I get the civilians to the sub-level junction at the third floor. The corridor branches—west to the evacuation route, east to a dead end. I send them west.
"Ada—" The elderly male, his hand on my arm. His fingers are shaking.
"I'm buying you time. Go."
He goes. They go. The corridor echoes with their footsteps, fading west.
I have one moment at the base of the stairs where I see it all clearly.
Dov's bad hands. The second-years with their guard stances I haven't finished correcting.
Renna's pivot that goes wrong when she's tired.
The bad generator nobody else knows how to coax.
The wall rotation, the supply schedules, the intelligence maps folded against my ribs that only I can read.
All of it is going to be someone else's problem by the time this is over. Or nobody's.
I go up.
There's no tactical justification for going up. The route down is cut. The Ordained have the lower stairwells. Going up means rooftop with no exit—a fifty-three-floor building with nothing at the top except sky and the kind of math that only comes out one way.
I go up because six people just went west, and the Ordained squad behind me will follow running. If the sound is going up instead of west, the squad follows me. I'm trading my exit for theirs. It's not a hard trade.
I take the stairwell at a run.
My ribs are screaming—the third-floor fight cost me something on the left side. Fractured, maybe. The kind of pain that sharpens everything instead of slowing it down.
I have two knives. I had four. The other two are in Ordained soldiers on the second floor who won't be following anyone.
They come up behind me. I can hear them—five, maybe six, organized, confident. They think I'm panicking. Running up with no exit is what panicked people do.
They don't know that panic left me about six floors ago, along with anything that could be mistaken for uncertainty.
I take the first one on the twelfth-floor landing. He comes around the corner and my blade finds the gap between his chest plate and his collar. Clean. Fast. He goes down without a sound. I'm past him before he hits the concrete.
The second one is smarter. He waits for backup. They come up in pairs after that, which slows them down. That's the point. Every floor I climb is another minute the civilians have. Every Ordained soldier who follows me up is one less chasing the people I sent west.
I fight a running battle through twenty floors.
The stairwells get narrower as the building rises—older construction, the upper floors never meant for foot traffic, the concrete crumbling in places where the rebar has rusted through.
I use the terrain. I use the dark. I use the corners, the jogs, the places where the steps are broken and an unfamiliar foot will stumble.
Two more go down. One on the twenty-eighth floor, where the stairwell jogs and I'm waiting in the jog with both blades. One on the thirty-fifth, where the railing gives under his weight and the fall takes care of the rest.
By the fortieth floor, three of them are left. Two knives left on my end. A fractured rib that has graduated from sharp pain to a deep grinding ache that makes every breath an argument.
I come out on the roof.
The sky is enormous. The canopy stretches in every direction—the upper towers catching the morning light, the ruins of the old city buried beneath the growth like bones under skin. The wind hits my face and the sweat goes cold.
Below, New Reach. Smoke from the breached eastern gate. Distant sounds of fighting that might be my people holding or might be the last of the defense collapsing. I can't tell from here. I can't help from here.
Behind me, the stairwell door. The Ordained are one floor below. I can hear them.
The rooftop is flat. Gravel and old solar panel frames and the rusted skeleton of a communications antenna that stopped communicating a long time ago. No cover. No exit. The parapet is waist-high, crumbling in places where the weather has been working at the concrete for decades.
Fifty-three floors.
I walk to the edge.