Chapter 30
TUR
Imove through the tunnels beneath the restaurant like a ghost made of teeth and memory.
The scent of ash and damp wiring coats my lungs, metallic and thick, clinging like regret.
My boots leave prints in the soot and powdered tile where the main dining hall used to be.
No one’s come down here since the first fire, maybe longer.
Kimberly thinks the safehouse in the north wing is our fallback.
She doesn’t know about the chamber beneath it.
The node chamber.
I don’t want her to know.
The world above is bleeding, gutted and smoking and begging for mercy we know isn’t coming. The Nine have coiled around Fierson like a parasite’s last squeeze, and the Alliance is playing diplomat to ghosts while their ships draw lazy orbiting circles overhead. Stabilization, they call it.
I call it a kill box.
This place—the ruins of the old restaurant, the node hidden underneath, the Reaper-built infrastructure humming beneath the concrete—this is our last stand. No one but me remembers how it was built. No one but me remembers how to crack it open and bleed it out if we need to.
So I do what needs doing.
I bypass the biometric safeties with my own claws.
Crack old codes etched into my blood back when the Alliance still whispered Reaper numbers like prayers.
The corridor lights flicker to life with a sickly green buzz, and I make my way down into the throat of the beast. The air down here is too cold. Still. Stale with disuse.
I start with the old traps. Deadman lines and pulse feedback triggers and adaptive mine networks no sane modern combatant would even try to touch. I rig the access points to detonate inward if tripped. If someone gets through… they won’t be whole when they do.
The node itself pulses in the dark. It isn’t a machine so much as a wound in the fabric of the planet, pulsing with power that doesn’t belong in this world or any other. We were supposed to control it. Contain it.
No one ever did.
I kneel beside the central console. The surface is still etched with the old glyphs. My name is buried in them. One of the original integration codes. My fingertips brush the pattern, and the system responds like it remembers me.
“Turon Viis,” it whispers in the old Reaper tongue. “Access accepted.”
Gods, I hate that voice.
I pull out the portable transmitter from my pack, snap the casing open, and slot the drive with shaking hands. This isn’t standard ops gear. This is what we call legacy black—hardware that never made it into the official reports, the kind of thing you bury in vaults and swear never existed.
I hit record.
“This is Turon Viis. ID Zeta-417, Reaper designation inactive, formerly under direct Alliance command. If you’re hearing this, I’m dead.”
My voice sounds like gravel ground through steel.
“I don’t care about legacy. I don’t care about history. I care about truth. The Reaper project wasn’t defense. It wasn’t even deterrence. It was leverage. It was occupation without flags.”
I pause. Swallow. My hands won’t stop shaking.
“We were built to be used. And when we stopped being useful, they cut us loose like a defective limb. And now… now they want the node back. Not because they understand it. Not because they can contain it. But because someone told them it was valuable, and they don’t like not owning their toys.”
I glance at the node, humming like it’s breathing.
“This place doesn’t belong to them. It doesn’t belong to the Nine. It doesn’t even belong to us.”
Another pause. I force my hands to still.
“It belongs to the people who bled for it. Kimberly Rhee is one of them. You touch her, you touch me. You touch me, you earn the worst death your godless tech can deliver.”
I finish the message. Encrypt it. Program the relay.
Twelve dead-drops, across twelve sectors, timed for automatic release if I don’t make my extraction check-in within the next seventy-two hours.
No melodrama.
Just contingency.
Just truth.
When I finish, I sit against the far wall of the node chamber. My hands fall into my lap. My claws retract. The cold sinks in deep.
I don’t expect to walk away from this.
And I’m okay with that.
Except—
The door hisses open.
I know that scent before she speaks. Cinnamon and gun oil. Anger barely leashed.
“Turon Viis, what the fuck have you done.”
Kim stands in the doorway like the god of war found new skin. Her eyes are glass and fire, locked on the console, on the traps, on the mess I’ve made out of goodbye.
I don’t stand.
I don’t lie.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
Her voice shakes. “You’re sending a death signal. You’re booby-trapping corridors. You’re prepping for a one-man martyr act and you didn’t tell me?”
“I told you what mattered.”
“No. You told me what mattered to you.”
She stalks forward, boots crunching over fractured tile.
“I know you think this is noble. That sacrificing yourself so I can walk away is some kind of grand romantic gesture—”
“It’s not romantic,” I cut in. “It’s tactical.”
She stops in front of me, hands balled into fists. “You arrogant, stubborn bastard. You really think I’ll let you do this alone?”
“This isn’t about letting,” I say, standing slowly. “This is about surviving.”
“Then why the fuck do you look like you’re already dead?”
I don’t answer.
She shoves me. Hard.
I stumble back a step, caught off guard.
“You don’t get to decide this,” she snaps. “You don’t get to leave me out of this fight.”
“I’m trying to protect you.”
“I didn’t ask you to protect me.”
“I love you,” I say, and it breaks something in the air between us.
She goes still.
The silence rings louder than an explosion.
“I love you,” I say again, softer. “That means I will burn this city to the ground before I let it take you.”
“And I love you,” she says, her voice shaking. “Which means I won’t let you make me watch you die.”
She steps closer.
We’re toe to toe now.
“This isn’t survival,” she says. “This is surrender dressed up in hero bullshit. And I’m not letting you go out like that.”
“I don’t see another option.”
“Then we make one.”
“Kim—”
“No. You don’t get to pull the trigger on this and call it mercy. We either walk out together or we don’t walk out at all.”
The words land like a punch.
I close my eyes.
Breathe.
Her hand finds mine. Trembles there. Fingers tight.
“We survive,” she says. “Or we burn together. Pick one.”
I open my eyes.
Press my forehead to hers.
“Together,” I whisper.
“Good,” she says, breathless.
Beneath our feet, the node pulses.
Once.
Then again.
A low rumble begins in the walls, like a beast waking up pissed and ancient.
“What’s happening?” she asks.
I pull her close, heart hammering.
“Something’s wrong.”
The glyphs on the console begin to flicker.
The lights shift from green to red.
The air tastes like ozone and lightning and old, deep things.
The system shouldn’t be waking.
It’s not supposed to.
But it is.
And it’s angry.
And it knows us.
The last thing I hear before the power flares is Kimberly whispering, “Tur—”
Then the world goes white.