Chapter 27 #2
Not a literal scream, but a proximity alarm, a Kaijen scanner alert flaring red across the holo display:
UNAUTHORIZED BEACON SIGNAL DETECTED — SHORT RANGE — ACTIVE
“Where—” I start, heart hammering.
Lonari grabs Morazin’s face, wrenching his jaw open with brutal efficiency. Morazin gags, coughing.
Something glints in the back of his mouth.
A tooth.
No—something embedded in the tooth. A tiny transmitter module, now cracked and bleeding signal like an open wound.
“Son of a—” I gasp.
Lonari’s voice is a low snarl. “Rook!”
Footsteps thunder outside the room. Doors slam. Voices shout in Kaijen dialect.
Jordan’s brain, the part that survives, snaps into action.
“How long?” I bark at the scanner readout.
The beacon pulses again, stronger.
ESTIMATED RESPONSE TIME: 3–7 MINUTES (LOCAL)
My stomach drops.
“They’re close,” I whisper.
Lonari rips a tool from his belt and jams it into Morazin’s mouth—prying, twisting. Morazin screams, muffled, spitting blood and metal.
“Kill him,” Morazin gurgles between coughs, still smug. “Go on. Prove you’re an animal.”
Lonari’s eyes are incandescent with rage, but his hands stay controlled. He doesn’t kill. He disables.
He tears the embedded module free with a wet snap, then crushes it in his fist like it’s nothing.
The beacon readout flickers… but doesn’t die.
My blood runs colder.
“It transmitted already,” I say, voice shaking.
The safehouse lights flicker once—subtle, but enough.
Jordan’s ears catch something beyond the walls: a distant metallic thunk… then another. Like heavy boots hitting concrete outside the perimeter.
Then the sound of cutting tools.
Plasma on metal.
They’re not knocking.
They’re breaching.
Lonari turns to me, eyes sharp. “Grab what you can.”
“I need—” I start, mind racing.
“Now,” he snaps.
I force my hands to move. I open my compad’s capture module and slam into Morazin’s restraint system—Kaijen cuffs have codes, override strings, specific encryption seeds. If we lose him, I need the key to track him.
I rip the restraint codes off the system and store them in three places: internal compad, Kaijen archive, dead-drop shard.
Then I focus on Morazin.
His mouth is bleeding. One tooth is missing. His eyes are wild now—not smug anymore, just survival.
I lean close, voice low. “You think you just won?”
Morazin spits blood. “I think you’re out of time.”
“Maybe,” I whisper. “But I’m still taking something from you.”
I flick my compad into biometric scan mode and press it close to his face—his eye, his skin, his mouth, the torn tooth cavity.
“Hold still,” I hiss.
He jerks away, but Lonari’s hand clamps his shoulder, pinning him.
The scanner pings, searching not for Morazin’s identity but for residual imprint—authorization traces, cryptographic signatures sometimes piggybacked in implanted tech. If High Lantern’s keys touched Morazin’s module, there might be a partial imprint—a fragment.
My compad chirps once, then flashes a result:
PARTIAL BIOMETRIC TRACE DETECTED — SOURCE: UNKNOWN AUTHORIZATION LAYER
My breath catches.
“Got you,” I whisper.
The wall to the left explodes inward with a concussive blast.
Dust and concrete powder fill the air like gray snow. The smell is sharp—burned rock, ozone, hot metal. My ears ring instantly.
Kaijen guards outside open fire. The corridor erupts in shouting and weapons discharge—controlled bursts, but frantic.
Lonari grabs me by the arm and yanks me backward, dragging me away from the breach.
“Move!” he roars.
Morazin shrieks, trying to thrash, but his cuffs keep him anchored to the chair.
I glance back—
Through the dust, black silhouettes pour through the breach.
Nine operatives.
Weapons up.
Silent.
My heart slams against my ribs like it’s trying to escape first.
Lonari’s people engage, and the safehouse becomes a storm of sparks and smoke.
I clutch my compad to my chest like it’s my spine, because in some ways it is—the restraint codes, the biometric trace, the recording channels, the leverage.
Lonari shoves me toward a back exit, a narrow service tunnel that smells like damp concrete and old coolant.
“Where’s Morazin?” I shout, voice cracking.
Lonari’s eyes are hard. “He’s coming.”
Behind us, someone screams—a Kaijen guard hit. The sound cuts off abruptly.
Morazin’s voice echoes through the chaos, taunting and panicked at once: “They’ll take me! They’ll—”
A gunshot cracks.
Not a kill shot. A disable. I hear Morazin grunt in pain.
Then Lonari’s voice, furious: “Shut up!”
We plunge into the tunnel, leaving the main room behind.
I don’t look back again until we’re running blind through the service veins, because if I look back, I’ll see who dies buying us seconds.
My lungs burn. The tunnel air tastes like rust.
I keep my compad pressed tight, feeling the vibration of distant explosions through the concrete.
And inside my pocket, inside my data, inside my screaming heart, I carry one critical thing the Nine didn’t plan on:
A partial biometric imprint tied to High Lantern.
Not a name yet.
But a trail.
And I’m going to follow it until it leads me to the person who thought they could restart a war like it was a machine.