Chapter 29
STING
Vi’s room is empty.
The door is closed and when I knock, once, twice, nothing comes back.
I try the handle. Open. Inside, the bed is made, papers gone from under the mattress where she thinks I don’t know she hides them, and Mara’s blanket is folded at the foot of the bed.
Two jackets gone from the hooks on the back of the door.
Two jackets gone. Not one.
My brain does what it does, fast, clean, with no wasted steps. Vi is gone. Mara is gone. Both jackets missing probably means they left together. The papers are gone too, which means this isn’t a casual outing. They’re carrying evidence they don’t want left behind, or they’re going to add to it.
I check the work hub. Mara’s station is unmanned. The Runt beside it says she left an hour ago, maybe more. Didn’t say where.
An hour.
The fragments I heard through Vi’s door reassemble themselves. East wing. Past the service corridors. Maintenance hatch. And if someone’s there?
They went. The two of them, alone, to the most dangerous section of the Rot, with no protection and no backup and no one who even knows where they are.
Except me. Because I heard them planning it and I didn’t stop it. Because I stood in a corridor and made the decision to keep walking and now, the two are somewhere in contested territory where anything can happen to anyone and no one answers for it.
I move.
I don’t run. Running draws attention, and attention creates problems. But I walk at a pace that people step out of the way of, because something in my posture is communicating a message I’m not bothering to soften. I find Rogue in the neutral zone, eating something out of a can.
“Vi and Mara are in No Man’s Land,” I tell him. “The contested section. They went for the documents.”
Rogue sets the can down without question. That’s the thing about Rogue. For all his careless charm and half grins, when the situation demands it, he’s got your back.
He’s on his feet and moving beside me in under three seconds. “How long?” he asks.
“Hour. Maybe more.”
He doesn’t say what we’re both thinking. An hour is a long time in that part of the Rot. An hour is enough time to find what you’re looking for, or for something to find you. Something you weren’t counting on.
We head past work hubs and residential sections into a thinning territory where the storefronts are empty and the population drops to people who prefer not to be found.
The tree at the atrium junction still has someone’s jacket hanging from its branch.
Nobody’s claimed it. Nobody’s cut it down. Nobody gives a shit here.
I’m running scenarios. I can’t help it. It’s what my brain does under stress, and the scenarios are not good.
Two women, no combat training, in a section of the Rot where the informal rule is that you keep what you can and you lose what you can’t.
My mind races to worst-case scenarios, all the ifs I torment myself with.
Did someone see them enter? Did someone follow them? Did they find the documents, but before they could get out, someone else decided they were valuable? Did they not find the documents and got lost in a sealed-off section with compromised infrastructure?
What if Vi is hurt?
That thought arrives and doesn’t leave. It sits in the center of everything else in my brain, loud and insistent, overriding my typical logic.
Is Vi lying on a concrete floor somewhere with a head wound or broken arm or worse?
Is the last thing I did was stand at a railing and watch Armen carry a folder to her room and feel relieved that someone else was making the hard choices I wouldn’t?
This is my fault.
I knew they were planning this. I heard them through the door and chose not to intervene because intervening meant looking at Vi directly, and every time I do, something happens that I can’t control.
So I prioritized my own emotional bullshit over her physical safety and now, she’s been in contested territory for an hour and I don’t know if she’s fucking alive.
Rogue and I push past the service corridor into the deeper section, our footsteps echoing differently because the acoustics change where the structure has been compromised, the sound bouncing off walls that aren’t where they used to be.
“There,” Rogue says.
I see them.
Two figures coming toward us down the corridor, moving fast but not running. Close together, one slightly ahead of the other, the trailing one keeping a hand on the leading one’s back.
Vi’s in front. She’s walking and upright. She’s carrying a bag pressed against her chest with both arms.
She’s also bleeding.
Goddammit.
The cut is on her left temple. Not deep.
I can tell from the flow pattern, the way the blood has tracked down the side of her face and along her cheek in a single line.
Superficial. A glancing blow, not a direct hit.
But there’s enough blood to make it look worse than it is, which is the thing about head wounds. They bleed like motherfuckers.
Behind her is Mara, breathing hard. She has no visible injuries, but there’s something in her posture that tells me she handled herself in whatever happened back there. She’s in the aftermath of adrenaline, which is different from shock. Shock makes you still. Adrenaline makes you vibrate.
Vi sees me and her stride doesn’t falter. She walks straight toward me with blood on her face and a bag of documents against her chest. Her eyes lock on mine with an expression I can’t read because there’s too much in it, all defiance and pain and something that which looks possibly, triumphant.
She got what she went for.
She stops in front of me. Close. Her breath is coming fast. The blood has reached her chin now, a thin red line threatening to drip down her shirt.
I stare at her and she stares back.
Every prepared response I have, every measured statement, and every calm assessment, is obliterated by the sight of her blood.
My speech, my reprimand, are all gone, replaced by a single, white-hot, wordless reaction that fills every available pore and has nothing to do with strategy or logic or any of the things I’m supposed to be.
I reach out and my hands find the side of her face, tilting her head to assess the wound. The gesture is automatic, the thing you do when someone is bleeding and you need to determine severity.
And I’m not only assessing the wound. I’m also holding her face in the middle of a dark corridor with Rogue behind me, Mara behind her, blood on my thumb, and I’m looking at her with something I can’t name.
Her expression transforms, her defiance softening. She sees whatever is on my face, whatever I’m failing to control, and she doesn’t look away.
“I got them,” she says, holding up the bag up between us. “That’s what matters.”
I look at her. Bruised, bleeding, alive.
That’s not what matters—but I can’t say it. Not here, not now, not with her bleeding and the truth hitting me all at once: I can’t lose her.