Page 81 of Wraith: Lethal Impact

I release her. My hands move to her face, tilting her chin up. The fluorescent light catches the damage—the shoulder laceration, the mud on her cheeks, the raw skin on her wrists. I catalog each injury with a fury that has no safe outlet.

"Are you hurt?”

“Nothing major.” She holds my gaze with the rock-steady composure that’s been dismantling every compartment in my head since the moment I pulled her off a blood-soaked stage. "I'm fine."

"What does he know?” I nod toward the man behind the desk, now on his knees with his hands behind his head, Bronco's sidearm pressed against the base of his skull.

"He thinks the compass is the only copy of the data." She steps close, dropping the words between us where only I can catch them. "I told him it needs a key to decrypt. He doesn't know Cipher extracted everything to the tablet."

"How many on the surface?” I'm already moving, pulling Lily toward the far wall where the captive women are huddled. My hands work the Ka-Bar through zip tie after zip tie, freeing wrists in rapid succession. The women stare up at me—the blood-covered apparition with a knife in one hand and a shattered optic on his rifle—with expressions that range from terror to disbelief to the first fragile spark of hope.

A dark-haired woman, thinner than the others, with sharp collarbones and a dark bruise along her jaw, grabs my wrist as I cut her ties. Her grip is surprisingly strong.

"Four guards on the loading dock. Two on the vehicles. One floater on the ramp." The intel is delivered with the clarity of someone who has been mapping her environment obsessively. "The corridor from this room goes left at the junction, then up a ramp to the surface. Thirty meters."

I look at Lily. She nods.

"Andrea." Lily's voice carries a tenderness that sits at odds with the concrete room and the dead men on the floor. "This is Dax."

Andrea looks at me. The assessment takes two seconds. Whatever she's looking for, she finds it. She nods once and releases my wrist.

I key the radio. "Cipher. Status."

"I've got your position on the tracker.” Cipher's voice crackles. “Installation chatter has gone dark—they've lost comms across the board. The evacuation vehicles on the surface are still running. You've got maybe ten minutes before they bolt."

"We're moving to the staging area."

"Copy." A pause. "And Wraith—Hutch is on the fallback frequency. TF9 QRF is forty minutes out."

Forty minutes. The Quick Reaction Force will arrive long after this is over, one way or the other. But the knowledge that backup exists—that the machine behind us is still turning—is a structural beam I didn't know I needed.

"Hammer. Rook. Bronco. We're taking the surface." I pull the scavenged MP5 from its sling and check the magazine. Thirty rounds. Suppressed. “Lily, you stay with the wom⁠—"

"I'm coming." The interruption is calm, and not negotiable. She’s not going to sit in a concrete room while the last act plays out above her.

I look at her. Barefoot. Unarmed.

I draw the SIG from the holster and press it into her hand. The weapon settles into her grip with the familiarity of something she has earned—the same grip her father taught her on a range outside Chicago, the same grip that dropped three Consortium operators in a burning warehouse.

"Nine rounds. Don't waste them."

"You taught me not to." The ghost of something—not a smile, something fiercer and more fragile—crosses her expression.

I turn to the corridor. The MP5 comes up. Rook takes point. Hammer starts to set his last charge on the ramp door, finds it unlocked, and puts a boot through it instead. Bronco covers the rear.

The ramp to the surface is where Andrea said it would be—thirty meters down the corridor, left at the junction, a concrete incline climbing toward a rectangle of gray morning light. The air changes as we ascend, the stale atmosphere of the subterranean level giving way to humid jungle air thick with diesel exhaust and wet vegetation.

The loading dock resolves at the top of the ramp: a wide concrete platform sheltered by a corrugated metal overhang. Two military-surplus trucks and a white panel van are parked in a row, engines idling, rear doors open. The northern fire road stretches into the jungle beyond, a rutted track disappearing into dense canopy.

Four guards on the dock. Two at the vehicles. One floater on the far side, as Andrea described.

Seven hostiles. Four operators. One ballerina.

I put three rounds from the MP5 into the nearest dock guard before he registers the movement at the top of the ramp. The suppressed weapon coughs—three quiet exhalations that drop him before the sound reaches his colleagues.

Rook engages the vehicle guards from the ramp's edge, his M4 cracking in controlled pairs. Both go down in rapid succession.

Bronco takes the floater—a single shot from his sidearm that catches the man mid-stride on the far side of the dock.