Eighteen
The storm hit just after midnight. It wasn’t hard enough to trap them in the safe house, but steady enough to erase whatever tracks Charlie Team had left in the snow outside.
Wind slid through the trees in long, thin breaths, rattling the old shutters and pressing cold against the windows until the glass hummed faintly in its frame.
Anya leaned over the kitchen table, illuminated by the flickering yellow glow of a battery lamp, her eyes fixed on the clutter of files they had unearthed from the Georgia archive.
Pages lay in meticulous lines—photographs, evaluations, redactions, survival indexes, and behavioral notes penned by men who confusingly mistook observation for ownership.
Across the room, Devon’s voice murmured through the speaker built into the portable console, low and clipped as he worked through the recovered drives from headquarters. Every few seconds came the soft click of keys or the muted beep of a system acknowledgment.
Charlie Team had settled into the surrounding rooms on staggered rest cycles, but no one really slept.
Ice sat in the adjoining den with one leg propped on a chair, cleaning his sidearm with the detached focus of a man who had learned long ago that rituals kept the mind from circling in bad places.
Antonov was locked in the back room under surveillance.
Justin stood at the far end of the table, sleeves rolled to the forearms, reading a printed report as if forcing the paper to confess by sheer pressure.
The cut on his arm from Orlov’s knife had been cleaned and wrapped, but he moved with the same deliberate economy he always did, as if injury were just another variable to account for.
For the past fifteen minutes, she had been aware of him, yet she hadn’t looked at him once. Her mind kept drifting back to their last encounter in the safe-house kitchen, and the lingering annoyance was almost unbearable.
Devon broke the silence first. “I’ve confirmed one thing. Dawn Wing is real.”
Justin looked up immediately, and Anya’s eyes lifted from the files.
“What have you got?” he asked.
“A transport ledger cross-referenced with coded procurement orders from the archive.” More keyboard clacking.
“Medical equipment. Munitions. Training gear. Biometric hardware. All routed through shell companies in Montenegro and Bosnia before disappearing into a dead military corridor along the Serbian border.”
Ice whistled softly from the next room. “That sounds subtle.”
“It isn’t supposed to be subtle,” Anya said.
She sensed Justin watching her, but she couldn’t meet his gaze, so she continued staring at the file in front of her.
“Sokolov doesn’t build temporary systems. He builds infrastructure.”
Devon’s silence suggested agreement.
Justin set the report down. “Devon, can you pin the exact site?”
“Not yet.”
“Can you narrow the corridor?”
“Yes.”
“That’ll have to do.”
Anya flipped open another file, her eyes narrowing as she gazed once more at the grainy intake photograph of Alex at sixteen—sharp, lean, and already exhibiting a startling level of control.
Unstable, the file had said. Program deviation. A flaw because he had thought for himself. A failure because he’d chosen blood over orders.
She should have felt insulted. Instead, she felt confirmed.
Her gaze shifted to the next file. Her own. The notes beneath her photograph were worse.
Outstanding long-range accuracy, remarkable emotional resilience, and high adaptive intelligence. However, struggles with maintaining command compliance when sibling stressors arise.
She shut the folder before the rest of the line could crawl under her skin.
Justin noticed. “What did yours say?”
She didn’t answer immediately. When she finally did, her tone was flat. “That I was difficult to own.”
A quiet beat passed, then Ice called from the den without looking up from the weapon in his hands, “That sounds about right.”
For the first time in the past hour, the corner of Justin’s mouth twitched. Not a smile. Close enough to be irritating.
Devon cleared his throat over the speaker. “There’s more.”
Justin’s expression reset instantly. “Go.”
“The archive included retrieval protocols.”
Anya went still. She had heard the phrase in the mine. Hearing it again in the quiet made it even worse.
Devon continued. “Most were standard termination-recovery documents, but three files were flagged with a different designation.”
Justin’s eyes sharpened. “Which is?”
“Asset reclamation.”
The room seemed to contract.
Ice looked up this time. “You’re kidding.”
“I’m not.”
Justin’s gaze moved to Anya, and she couldn’t look away.
“Names,” he said quietly.
Devon exhaled once. “Antonov.”
There was no surprise there. A former prototype who knew too much and had not yet died.
The second name landed harder. “Pierce.”
The room went silent. Even the wind outside seemed to pause before throwing sleet harder against the shutters.
Anya’s heart pounded, but she kept her face still by force.
Pierce.
Not dead in the water. Not erased. Not terminated. Reclamation.
Sokolov had wanted him alive, too.
Justin’s voice stayed level. “Third.”
Devon hesitated.
And that told her before he said it.
“Anya.”
Her name fell into the room like a blade laid carefully on a table.
Ice swore softly.
Justin did not speak at all.
Anya’s muscles tensed painfully, locking her body in place without a single movement. It wasn’t a surprise—more like the unmistakable shape of a fear made real, gripping her from within.
She folded her arms and leaned back against the edge of the table, the tension in her body revealing how standing still suddenly felt too much like being targeted.
“Why reclaim three?” Ice asked, finally voicing what mattered.
Anya answered before Devon could. “Because each one represents a different stage of the program.”
Justin looked at her.
She kept going. “Antonov is survival data. A prototype who slipped beyond their perimeter and stayed alive. Pierce is architecture. A handler who knew what the program was designed to become.” She paused only once. “And I’m proof.”
Devon said quietly, “Proof of what?”
She met Justin’s gaze over the spread of files. “That it worked.”
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Then Justin’s expression shifted—not in pity or alarm, but in recognition. “Sokolov doesn’t want to erase you.”
“No.”
“He wants to put you back inside the machine.”
“Yes.”
His jaw tightened once. “That’s not happening.”
The certainty in his voice hit somewhere she did not appreciate. Or maybe she appreciated it too much, and that was the problem.
She pushed off the table and moved toward the window, peeling back the edge of the curtain with two fingers to look into the dark.
Nothing was visible beyond the blown swirl of snow and the black trunks of the trees.
Still, she felt watched. That had been true for days now. Days? No. Longer. Years, probably. She let the curtain fall and spoke without turning. “He thinks Alex will come if I’m taken.”
Ice muttered from the other room, “Would he?”
Anya closed her eyes briefly before anyone noticed the pain in them. “Yes.”
There was no point lying about that. No point pretending the answer wouldn’t split the whole room open if Sokolov ever got his hands on her.
Alex would come. Bleeding, furious, silent as winter, but he would come.
Justin stepped up beside the table behind her. She didn’t turn, but she knew the exact second he shifted his weight. “Then we don’t let them take you.”
It sounded simple—almost insultingly simple.
She looked back at him over one shoulder. “You keep saying that like force of will is a tactical plan.”
“It’s step one.”
“And step two?”
He folded his arms. “We stop moving where they expect.”
Now she fully turned. That had her attention.
Devon picked up the thread immediately. “He’s right.”
Ice leaned back in his chair. “I hate how often that keeps happening.”
Justin ignored him. “Georgia worked because they knew we’d go. They expected pressure. They expected retrieval.”
Anya crossed back to the table and planted both hands on it, looking down at the Balkan corridor map still open beneath the files. “So we don’t go directly at Dawn Wing.”
“No.”
“We make them show us where the route breathes.”
Justin nodded. “Supply lines, transfer personnel, med shipments, comm relays. Anything that feeds a facility that size.”
Devon’s tone sharpened with the excitement he only ever let into his voice when a puzzle started to align. “I can pull from the procurement channels and overlay unusual transport routes with inactive military infrastructure. Give me a few hours.”
“Take them,” Justin said.
Anya’s gaze flickered once more over the route markers softly glowing on the screen.
The Balkans unfolded before her—towering mountain corridors, haunted by ghostly remnants of military history, shadowed black-market roads, and ancient war scars that laid the groundwork for new conflicts to flourish.
Somewhere out there, Sokolov was building replacements. He was teaching kids to become shadows. She felt anger rise, hard and clean.
Good.
Anger was easier to use than fear.
Gucci emerged from the hall, shrugging into her non-HIS-issued, name-brand jacket. “We rotating watch?”
Justin nodded. “Double perimeter. No external light. No one opens that door unless I say so.”
Gucci didn’t ask why. She didn’t need to.
The atmosphere in the room had shifted. Less briefing. More siege.
She left without another word.
Devon’s voice came back through the speaker, quieter now. “There’s another file you need to hear.”
Justin looked up. “Read it.”
“Program notes,” Devon said. “Access restricted to command-level review. It references the Morozov twins directly.”
Anya’s entire body seemed to go cold from the inside out.
Justin’s expression darkened. “Go.”
Devon read from the file. “Prototype Result: Morozov twins exhibit unusually high adaptive sync under field pressure. Subject separation recommended to reduce mutual loyalty and increase command dependence. If separation fails, secondary containment options should prioritize the female asset.”