Page 63 of Claimed By the Wraiths

I understood it then.

Not a purge.

Isolation.

The hub was hardened against an external shutdown, but command could still cut privileged routes, throw the protected research enclave local-only, and strand every database behind a wall Jessa’s worm could no longer cross.

What we’d already broadcast would survive.

What Vain had built would survive too.

His palm touched the reader.

I reached him first.

It was fast.

Two seconds. Clean.

The kind of kill a soldier makes when there is no reason to make it anything else.

Vain hit the floor.

The panel flashed once above him.

AUTHORIZATION INTERRUPTED.

For half a second, nothing moved.

This was the man who had turned Ebon Gate into a trap and made criminals out of the people who survived it. The man behind eight years of tables and collars and forced bonds and cells full of people whose names he’d reduced to subject numbers.

On the floor, he looked smaller than the damage.

There was no balance in it. No satisfaction large enough to answer what he’d done.

Just a body against a wall and a problem that had stopped moving.

“Nineteen minutes,” Deyric said.

Jessa.

The live objective snapped back into place.

The shadow-meld surged before I could pull it down.

My legs went.

Not because of one fight.

Because I’d spent nearly two weeks taking pieces out of myself a few minutes at a time: dark crossings, deep compressions, sleep cut into fragments, food when I remembered it, the little blank spaces that had started appearing between one moment and the next.

Then I’d spent whatever remained on six men trained to hunt the dark.

The corridor tilted.

My hands stopped belonging to me.

The silver under my skin flickered at the edges of my vision.