It was night.
They moved like shadows.
Emma clipped a tiny mic to Diana's collar and spoke into the other end, low and flat. "Carlo — loop the feeds and give us the shortest safe route. No chatter."
A thin voice came back in her ear, urgent but steady. "Feeds looped in sixty. I'll ping you three markers — follow the green. Stay out of light."
They passed the hideout's back alleys, masks pressed to their faces, breath quiet behind fabric. Emma carried the gun at her hip like a promise; Diana's hands were empty and steady. Both wore the same look — business, not fury. They had one objective: find Vencor's stash, neutralize the Chain of Ruin, leave no trace that could be used again.
The route Carlo fed them skirted main roads and cut through a service yard where the storage facility's night shift came and went. At the far wall a lone guard paced a slow, bored circle beneath a sodium lamp. He smelled of stale smoke and cheap coffee.
They didn't hesitate.
They struck together — two motionless silhouettes folding toward him, so fast a single thought couldn't form. Emma's hand closed at his throat; Diana's boot found the hollow behind his knee. The guard's knees buckled. He hit the ground with a dull thud. Emma dropped down, and with a single, clinical motion she pressed her boot to his face until the light left his eyes. Not to kill — to hold. His breath came ragged and shallow; he was down, not dead. Emma slid a rag across his mouth and tucked him into a shadowed recess. "Alive," she murmured into the mic. "Leave him."
Carlo's voice in her ear was a tight thread of sound. "Cams looped. You have eight minutes before a manual sweep fails the loop. I'm jamming their guards' radios now."
They moved.
Every step was planned. Diana kept the left flank, watching windows; Emma kept the right, checking footsteps and listening for the soft click of closing doors. At service doors they used the tips Carlo gave them — maintenance codes and the blind minutes when deliveries were processed. When a camera swung close, Emma froze and Diana ducked behind dumpster edges until the glass rolled past. Lights were a hazard; shadows were corridors.
They found the storage room low and windowless, unlocked because Vencor trusted cheap locks for expensive crimes. The door opened on a cold, chemical smell — metallic and sweet, like something that would kill you softly if you breathed it. Row after row of sealed cases waited on pallets. Black-violet vials glinted inside foam-lined boxes. The Chain of Ruin, stacked in columns, absurd and obscene in the fluorescent quiet.
Celeste's teaching came back to Emma now — how to neutralize agents without spreading contamination. She moved with that knowledge, not with panic. They wore masks. Emma set one case aside to open and examine the ampoule inside — Carlo piped lab notes into her ear, the chemical name, the burn radius, the ignition temp. No explosives. No fire near volatile liquids. Incineration would aerosolize the toxin.
They worked fast and precise:
• Diana swept the room for people while Emma removed the seals and cross-checked serial tags against Carlo's list.
• Emma used a small field kit to neutralize the ampoules — a corrosive neutralizer that rendered the active compound inert, dissolving it into a harmless sludge. She poured it into every open vial she could, then crushed the glass in a sealed bag.
• Where neutralizer wouldn't reach, Emma placed timed thermal charges on the crates' outer casings only, set to scorch and melt plastics and plywood — to destroy packaging and accessible stock without vaporizing contents. Carlo confirmed the charges would burn hot enough to ruin logistics papers and storage racks but not to aerosolize the poison.
They worked in silence punctuated by the whisper of fabric and Carlo's thin voice counting time.
Time ran short. The loop jittered; a camera cut to a different feed for a heartbeat. "One minute," Carlo warned. A footstep near the far corridor — a guard on an unplanned patrol. Diana's hand found Emma's sleeve; she pressed and pointed. Emma nodded.
They finished the neutralization and sealed the crushed vials in multiple layers of heavy bags. Diana wheeled the heaviest boxes to the loading bay; Emma set the thermal charges on the crates' exteriors and wired them to staggered times. "Burn the evidence," Emma said into the mic. "Destroy the network. Don't create more victims."
They left a single small cache — a single vial and a handful of labels — intentionally intact and hidden under a false floorboard in a storage closet. "Proof," Emma said quietly. "We take this to Aria. We prove it. We make them accountable." Carlo acknowledged it — he'd already prepared encrypted backups; Aria could use the sample.
They melted into the dark as the first timers clicked alive and a low whisper of heat began to blacken wood. The loop held for a breath longer; the guard in the courtyard turned his head like a slow animal. Then he walked on.
They made the same path back, quieter now because the work had weight behind it. Near the service gate a pair of men rounded the corner — they smelled wrong, heavy with institution. Diana stepped forward, eyes hard. She let the men see them for a second and then, with a smooth, practiced motion, slammed into one man, forcing him into the other, creating a rolling tangle that spilled across the wet concrete. Emma moved behind them, pressed the gun into the first man's ribs and held it there until he stopped struggling.
They left them alive and broken on the pavement. "Witnesses," Emma said. "They'll remember the faces of the ones who walked out."
Carlo's voice back at the rendezvous: "Charges will go full this time. Get to the hill. I'm watching the back roads. You have two minutes before the alarms trigger local locks."
They ran.
Behind them, fires took hold; crates smoked; plastic popped and sagged. No great inferno — precise ruin. No clouds of purple mist. No new victims.
They reached the rendezvous panting, masks wet inside. The team gathered, eyes flicking over them like a checklist. Emma handed off the sample drawer to Aria's courier and watched it disappear into guarded hands. "We burned proof," she said, voice flat. "We didn't create bodies."
Diana looked at her then — close enough that Emma could see the dark threads under Diana's eyes. "You okay?" she asked.
Emma's answer was a small, steady nod. "We bought time."
They melted back into the hideout, the night folding up around the distant light. The Chain of Ruin was broken for now, but the echo of the operation would spread. Vencor would notice. He would react. They had traded a small victory for a larger war.
Emma stepped into the kitchen, pulled off her mask, and for the first time since Valeria's grave, let a single, quiet breath out — not tears, not relief, just the slow sound of someone still standing after doing the right, brutal thing.