37. Kalev
KALEV
The cuffs are too tight.
Not because they bite into my skin. They’re built not to bruise, engineered for compliance and plausible deniability.
It’s the message they send that rubs raw—the arrogance of thinking they can contain me.
That after everything, I’d go quietly. That I wouldn’t come unmade for the people they just ripped out of my life.
My back rests against the transport wall. Not slumped. Waiting.
The rhythm of the wheels grinding against the track is steady, smooth. But that’s surface-level. I listen deeper—to the slight over-rev in the power core, the flutter of nerves in the younger guard’s breath, the static tic in the comm relay cycling a secure channel.
They’re not just relocating me.
They’re moving me into a final position.
For erasure. Or leverage. Or worse.
I crack my neck. Then my knuckles. Slow. Deliberate.
I wait until the second turn.
Because I know this route. I built it. Back when I was still “useful.”
The moment the transport hits the incline tunnel—one of only two spots without a surveillance relay—I move.
I twist my hands outward, break the skin on my left thumb dislocating it to slide the cuff just far enough to get the leverage I need. My shoulder screams. I scream with it, but not in surrender. In purpose.
My foot hooks the restraint column. I yank. Hard.
The bolt gives.
So does the lock.
The cuffs fall.
The guards notice a half-second too late.
One swings his baton. I duck, grab his arm mid-swing, and use his momentum to throw him face-first into the wall. He crumples with a wet crack.
The other pulls his sidearm.
Bad move.
I shove the first guard’s body into his line of sight and slam the heel of my boot into his kneecap. It snaps.
He drops.
I catch his gun mid-fall.
Safety off. Barrel up. One shot to the ceiling camera to buy time.
I roll the guards’ unconscious bodies to block the hatch. Not perfect, but it’ll slow backup. Then I kneel and pull up the deck plate beneath the first seat on the left.
My gear’s still there.
Wrapped in vacuum-seal. Buried under layers of circuitry they’d never guess to check.
I strip out of the transport uniform. Underneath, I pull on the black weave armor—coded to my biometrics. Lightweight, adaptive, and laced with micro-filament defenses.
Next, the dermal patch. I press it to my temple.
It stings. Then hums.
The code pings my neural implant.
A voice—mine, recorded—whispers: “Execute Red Signal Nine.”
Every contingency I ever designed if the Alliance turned on me lights up across the system like nerve endings catching flame.
Dead drops activate in twelve cities.
Black sites start bleeding files into open air.
Across hidden nodes, caches detonate—video, logs, tactical footage, entire redacted dossiers pulled out of shadows.
Every name they tried to erase resurfaces.
Including mine.
But I’m not watching that now.
I’m loading the pulse rifle from the under-bench cache, checking the sights, the charge.
Movement outside the hatch.
Three seconds.
I reach into the panel behind me and hit the override.
The hatch blows outward in a fire of sparks.
Gunfire chases it.
I dive.
Roll.
Come up under a hail of noise and panic.
Senta’s already there—back to a wall, rifle steady.
“You’re late,” I grunt.
“You’re heavy,” she retorts. “Thought you might’ve taken a nap.”
“Figured I’d wait for the fireworks.”
“Romantic,” she deadpans. Then nods behind her. “Extraction route clear two blocks north. But we’ve got a very small window.”
I follow her out.
Street level is chaos. We duck into the smoke cloud she seeded with thermite charges and vanish between two loading rigs.
Her bike waits in a maintenance bay behind a sealed gate.
It’s sleek. Silent.
A wolf among rabbits.
I swing up behind her.
She kicks it to life.
We move.
And while we do, I start checking signals. Each one’s confirmation burns in my HUD.
Contingency Tree Zeta-3: Active.
Dead Drop Echo: Breach Verified.
Operative Narai: Routing Broadcast Node.
By the time we reach the safe house, I know the plan’s working.
We hit the underground lot. Metal walls. Lead insulation. EMP-resistant doors.
Inside, it’s dark.
Secure.
Familiar.
I drop into muscle memory.
Secure perimeter.
Scan for bugs.
Set suppressors.
Then I cross to the comm hub.
Five encrypted lines glow green.
I dial the first.
“Zek,” I say. “Wake up.”
The man on the other end doesn’t ask who it is.
He just breathes, “Finally,” and then starts reciting names, locations, ops burned clean through.
We’re not just leaking data.
We’re burying Dowron’s command in it.
Hours pass in minutes.
I make four more calls.
Each one reactivates a cell we mothballed years ago. Not loyalists. Survivors. People who saw what Dowron did and walked away scarred.
People like me.
People with unfinished business.
By dawn, I’ve built the scaffold of a revolution.
Senta leans against the wall, watching me reassemble the war I once walked away from.
“You sure about this?” she asks.
I don’t answer right away.
I think about Leah’s face.
The way her eyes went flat when they yanked Clancy from her arms.
I think about my son screaming for his mother.
I think about Thale’s voice, smug and poisonous, whispering Dowron’s betrayal in my ear like it was a gift.
“Yes,” I say.
She nods.
“I’ve got something for you,” she adds, crossing to a storage crate.
She opens it.
Inside lies a blade.
My blade.
Forged on Vakut Prime. Tempered in insurgency.
Sheathed in the blood of men who thought I couldn’t be broken.
I take it.
The grip fits my hand like memory.
Like home.
I don’t smile.
But something in me settles.
The war isn’t coming.
I’m bringing it.
They think I’m coming at them like a soldier.
That’s their mistake.
This isn’t a battlefield.
It’s a hunt.
And I’ve been patient for years.
Now I don’t have to be.
I start with the last confirmed ping off the handler’s escort unit.
Not the decoy signals—they always build those in—but the glitch they never fixed in their data rotator.
A time signature that’s half a second out of sync.
It’s the kind of flaw only someone who built the system from the inside would recognize.
That someone is me.
Senta watches me work without asking questions. She knows what this is. Not mission work. Not vengeance.
Reclamation.
The handler took Leah.
Took Clancy.
Took us.
So I take back the silence. The power. The rules.
By the time we trace the signal chain through three black-market relays and a ghost port off the Eshkar Strip, I’m already arming my next move.
“We have a location?” Senta asks, pulling on her vest.
I nod. “Abatis Basin. Remote outpost. No public manifests.”
“Who’s watching it?”
I load the last clip into my sidearm. “No one now.”
She grins. “Let’s go be ghosts.”
The transport we take isn’t tracked. I pay for it with a chip carved out of an old black-level clearance file. The currency’s data. History. Leverage. Out here, it spends better than gold.
We reach the basin at dusk.
Heat shimmers off the cracked stone ground. The air tastes like copper and burned oil. There’s no official signal coming out of the comm tower, but that just tells me it’s operational. No outpost runs cold unless they’re hiding something.
I go in alone.
Senta stays in the outer ring, surveillance scope active, rifle balanced on her shoulder.
“Whistle if you die,” she murmurs over comms.
“Whistle twice if I don’t.”
The compound isn’t large. Half-buried prefab structures, camouflaged with faux erosion patterns. But I know the silhouette.
It’s a Coalition holdover—a site once used for “reeducation transfers.” They thought no one remembered. That no one survived.
They were wrong.
Inside, I move silent.
Boots whisper over concrete. My breath stays shallow.
At the end of the corridor, I hear it—a voice I haven’t heard since the transport.
Thale.
The handler.
He’s talking to someone over secure comms, voice low, clipped.
“Confirm relocation in seventy-two. The child goes to Facility Seven. The woman is non-priority after extraction. The father… monitor, for now. He’s unhinged, but potentially useful again.”
My blood goes still.
Unhinged.
Useful.
Like I’m a broken blade they might resharpen.
I step into the doorway.
“Try it.”
Thale spins, one hand going for the console. I shoot it before he touches it. Sparks burst.
He freezes.
Then smiles.
“Kalev,” he says lightly. “You look well.”
I walk toward him slow. Measured. Each step deliberate.
“I want my son,” I say.
“And Leah?” he asks, head tilting. “You think we don’t know what she means to you?”
“I don’t care what you know,” I say, my voice low. “I care where they are.”
He doesn’t answer.
So I shoot him.
Once.
Through the thigh.
He screams.
Drops.
I crouch beside him, the barrel of my pistol pressed against his throat.
“You don’t get to be a person anymore, Thale,” I whisper. “You get to be a data source.”
He tries to smile again.
Fails.
He’s bleeding bad.
“You can kill me,” he spits, “but it won’t stop anything. Dowron owns the whole field. You’re just a loose piece.”
I press harder with the barrel. “Then it’s time to clear the board.”
He shakes his head, sweat beading. “They’ll bury her in an off-world blacksite. The kid won’t even know his name.”
“They’ll try,” I say.
Then I lean close. “But I will find them. And when I do, I’ll make sure Dowron sees what it costs to underestimate me.”
I rise.
He’s still conscious.
I let him stay that way.
As I leave, I fire one round into the power conduit.
Alarms shriek.
Emergency lights kick in.
Senta meets me at the perimeter.
“Well?”
“He’s not dead.”
She raises an eyebrow.
I shrug. “Not yet.”
“Coordinates?”
“Partial. But enough.”
She tosses me a canteen.
“Drink. You’re gonna need everything in you. Because wherever they took her, it won’t be guarded like this place.”
I take the canteen. Drink deep.
The water tastes like dust and metal.
But underneath it, I taste resolve.
“They think I’m chasing,” I say. “But I’m not.”
She frowns. “Then what are you doing?”
I holster my pistol.
And smile for the first time in days.
“I’m reclaiming.”