Chapter 10 - Wren
TEN
Wren
The satellite phone is a heavy, rugged brick of black plastic that looks like it belongs in a bad nineties action movie. Right now, it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
"Frost?" I press the receiver closer to my ear, straining against the static. "Say that again. You're breaking up."
Kade is at the front window, peering through the slats of the blinds. He's been like a caged animal all morning—pacing, checking weapons, checking the horizon. The peace of last night's blindfolded oblivion has been replaced by the sharp, metallic edge of what's coming.
"...confirmed the extraction," Frost's voice comes through, tinny and distant. "Echo is... forty minutes out... weather is... chop..."
"Forty minutes?" I look at Kade. "He says forty minutes."
Kade nods, but his shoulders don't drop. "Ask for the rendezvous coordinates. The cabin isn't a viable LZ if the cloud ceiling drops."
"Frost—we need coordinates. Kade says—"
SCREEEE.
A high-pitched shriek tears through the speaker, sharp enough to wrench the phone from my ear. Then: absolute silence. No static. No hiss. Dead air.
"Frost?" I tap the screen. "Frost, are you there?"
The signal bars—two weak ones, barely holding—are gone. In their place, a blinking message: SEARCHING FOR NETWORK.
"I lost him." Panic flutters in my chest. "Dropped call."
Kade turns from the window, his expression grim. "Not dropped."
"What?"
"Signal strength—is it zero?"
"Yes."
"Fluctuating?"
"No. Just gone."
He crosses the room and takes the phone. Walks to the center of the room, holds it up. Moves to the window. Nothing.
"Jammer." His voice is dangerously calm. "They're blanketing the spectrum. We lost our lifeline."
The blood drains from my face. "That means they're—"
"Close. Close enough to deploy electronic countermeasures."
As if on cue, the cabin plunges into darkness.
The refrigerator hum dies. The table lamp flickers once and goes. The microwave clock blanks. Instantaneous. Absolute.
The silence that follows presses against my ears like water.
"Power," I whisper. "They cut the power."
"Get down."
He moves with terrifying speed, tackling me onto the braided rug. We hit the floor hard, dust puffing up around us.
"Stay low. They have night vision. Windows are kill zones."
He crawls for his gear bag and comes up with the rifle. I scramble for the shotgun leaning against the couch. My hands close around the stock before my brain catches up—muscle memory doing the work, hands remembering what my mind can't process fast enough.
I've racked this slide until it was automatic, in daylight, over and over, and now in the dark, my thumb finds the safety, and my support hand finds the pump without a single wasted motion. The training lives in my hands. I didn't know how much until now.
High tang. Firm grip. Lean in. Kade’s words come back to me.
"Are they breaching?" My voice sounds too loud in the dark.
"Not yet." Kade moves to the wall, checks the perimeter monitor—the screen is black, wall-powered, useless. "They're blinding us first. Deafening us. They want us panicked before they come through."
"Psychological warfare."
"Exactly. They're isolating the battlefield. The assault is coming."
"What do we do?"
"We make them doubt what they're seeing."
Hand warmers.
"Do it," Kade says before I can speak. "Stay below the window line."
I move.
Crawling across the kitchen floor in the dark, navigating by memory.
The box of chemical warmers is above the stove—I counted four packets yesterday without knowing why.
My hands close on the box. I rip the first packet open and shake it violently, feeling the grit and iron filings begin to heat between my palms.
"Where?" I whisper.
"Bathroom. Bedroom. Back door. Spread the signatures."
I drag myself down the hallway. It feels miles long.
First packet: the bathtub. Second: the bedroom floor. Third: taped to the leg of the dining table near the back door—I use a strip of electrical tape from the junk drawer I memorized on day one.
If Ivan Kova's team is outside looking through thermal scopes, the cabin reads as occupied in every room. Multiple bodies. Heat moving through the structure.
Ghosts. Decoys.
Digital architecture, translated into the physical world.
I crawl back to the main room. Kade has overturned the heavy oak table and barricaded himself behind it, rifle resting on top, aimed at the front door.
"Position," he orders. "Loft. You cover the back. Kitchen window, bedroom window—anything that comes through from that side, you end it."
"Okay."
I move up the short flight of stairs to the loft. It overlooks the main room and gives a clear sightline down the back hallway. I drop onto my stomach, the shotgun stock pressed into my shoulder. Cold wood against my cheek.
Cheek weld. Sight alignment. Lean in.
And we wait.
Time loses its shape.
Five minutes or fifty—impossible to tell. The cabin breathes and creaks. A branch drags across the roof like nails across slate. Every shadow looks like a man. Every rustle is a boot step.
My eyes strain against the dark. Muscles cramp. The bruise on my shoulder pulses, anticipating the recoil.
Then I hear it.
Scritch.
Faint. Coming from the back bedroom.
I stop breathing.
Scritch. Click.
Glass being cut. Not a breaching charge. Not the front door. A probe—a scout attempting quiet entry while the main force pins Kade at the front.
"Kade." Below a whisper. "Back bedroom."
"I can't leave the front." Just as quiet. "If I move, they breach the main door. Can you see it?"
I inch forward.
The bedroom door is open. A shadow detaches from the window frame.
Darker than the darkness around it. A silhouette. It moves with fluid, inhuman grace—stepping over the sill and onto the floor like something that has done this a hundred times. No hesitation. No wasted motion.
He's inside.
Panic flares—hot, blinding, animal. I'm a coder. I type. I don't do this. I've never—
The glint of metal in the shadow's hand stops the thought cold.
A knife. Long, serrated blade.
He's not here to negotiate. He's here to cut throats in the dark and disappear, the way Ivan Kova's people always disappear, and Kade is five feet below me with his back exposed—
You are your last line of defense.
You have to be able to end it.
One breath. In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
I shift the shotgun.
The movement is tiny. But the shadow freezes.
He hears me.
He turns. Night-vision goggles glow with a faint, terrible green light. His pistol—suppressed, barrel extended—comes up in one practiced arc.
I don't think. I don't hesitate. I don't flinch.
Center mass. Aggressive stance. Lean in.
I squeeze the trigger.
BOOM.
The muzzle flash turns the hallway white, burning the image into my retinas—the silhouette lifting off its feet, thrown backward through the window he just entered, glass shattering outward in a cascading waterfall of noise.
I pump the action.
CLACK-CLACK.
Gunpowder, sharp and familiar, fills the air.
"Wren?" Kade's voice is edged with something close to panic.
"Target down." My voice sounds strange to my own ears. Hard. Ferocious. Like something that has always lived in me and is only now finding its name.
"Reload. Stay on it."
I fumble a shell from the side saddle and shove it into the magazine tube. Hands trembling, but working. Working.
There is no room to process what I just did. No room for horror, no room for triumph. Because the moment my shot rings out, the silence outside fractures.
A shout. A command in a language I don't know.
And then the front of the cabin explodes.