Nova
Nobody moves.
I don’t either.
Laith is standing at the tree line and I don’t know how long he’s been there. Long enough to see all of it, probably.
He looks at Harrick on the ground. His son on his knees.
Then past Silas.
At Trey.
Just for a second.
Then he finds me.
“Stand down.”
Doesn’t raise his voice. Doesn’t need to.
They obey. It moves through the army like water — operatives stepping back, some of them shifting back to human, the whole thing dissolving in under a minute. Whatever authority Silas arrived with, it was always borrowed.
Silas is still on his knees.
He looks up at his father and for just a second his face does something I wasn’t expecting.
Hope.
Until he sees Laith’s expression.
“She’s an abomination.” His voice is cracking. “You can see what they are. The system — everything we built—”
“Is not your concern right now.”
“It’s all of it. It’s everything, Harrick is dead and you’re just standing there like—”
“Silas.” The way Laith says it closes a door. “Enough.”
Silas stares at him.
Laith looks at the two operatives still close. “Get him out.”
They move.
Silas doesn’t go quietly. His hands grip the road.
He twists away, still talking — corruption, abomination, thirty years of ideology coming apart at the seams — and under all of it there’s something that sounds less like conviction and more like a question his father won’t answer and he can’t stop asking.
Laith watches him go and doesn’t say a word.
It’s not the army. It’s his own father who makes the call, and watches as Silas is dragged out of the way.
He doesn’t even bother to tell him why.
The trees take him.
I feel like it should be satisfying.
It’s not.
The road goes quiet. The Hollow is still holding its breath behind me. The guys shift around me, still on guard.
Laith looks at me.
“You knew,” I say.
“Yes.”
“The whole time.”
“You could say that.”
Things are clicking into place too fast. The Hollow. Minerva. The people who kept finding her — scared and lost and somehow making it here, to this specific place, in the middle of nowhere. The infrastructure. The way this place existed at all.
Oh.
Oh no.
“You guided them,” I say. “You’re the reason these people all ended up here.”
He stands there looking at me like he’s waiting for something.
Of course he does.
“It wasn’t an accident,” I say. “None of it was.”
“I knew who Minerva was,” he says. “What she’d do if the right people kept arriving.” He takes a breath. “At least that was my hope. So I made sure they did.”
Behind me Minerva makes a sound like she’s disappointed.
“I built this for you,” Laith says. “I set Minerva, the Hollow, all of it in motion so you would have somewhere to go.”
Somewhere to go.
I can’t breathe.
Fifteen years of nowhere. Alleys and exits and making myself small enough that the system looked through me. And the whole time there was a door. Someone making sure it stayed open.
Not for kindness.
Not for me.
For the experiment.
“You set my whole life in motion,” I say.
“I did.”
“And then you watched.”
“Yes.”
It’s the same tone as the bunker. Fact. He did what he did and he’s not going to apologize it just because I’m the one who paid for it.
I almost respect it.
Almost.
The whispers start.
Minerva moves through the crowd without looking at anyone and stops a few feet away. She’s looking at Laith with an expression I’ve never seen on her face before. Not anger. Something underneath anger that’s been sitting there a lot longer.
“You sent them to me,” she says.
“I knew what you’d do with your access, your knowledge of the archives. And I knew what they needed.”
“You used me.”
“I trusted you.” Something shifts in his face — not quite a flinch. “There’s a difference. I wasn’t certain you’d take them in. I hoped.”
Minerva’s mouth presses thin.
She doesn’t say anything else.
She doesn’t step back either.
I look at her. All the time she spent building, believing it was her rebellion. Believing she’d stopped closing the door because she chose to.
Laith just destroyed almost thirty years of her life in one sentence.
And she’s still standing.
We both are.
I look back at Laith.
He doesn’t get forgiveness. That’s not what this is.
“You’re staying,” I say.
He doesn’t argue.
“You don’t go anywhere until I figure out what to do with you.”
Vaelor growls.
I look at him, then to Minerva.
She’s already watching me.
She nods, barely.
I meet Laith’s eyes.
“Until we figure out what to do with you.”
Cal and Brent are there before I even think about it. They step up beside him and that’s that. Laith goes. He’s not fighting it. I didn’t think he would.
I turn and watch them go.
I look around, I can’t help it.
Because the Hollow is still here. All of us— the forest shifters, Brent, Lena with Max’s arm around her, Zoe somewhere in the back with Eli— watching me.
My men.
My home.
Laith put the Hollow into motion.
But he didn’t make it what it is.