Echoes of Ash (Part 2)
They made me practice like a weapon.
If the last week had taught me anything, it was that power without control was a fuse wired to a bomb. The safehouse smelled of coffee and ozone; the monitors hummed; men moved like shadows with purpose. And in the middle of it, Damian put me through the sort of drills he'd used on men who'd let hubris ruin them.
"Breathe," he said, voice flat, standing opposite me in the little cleared space by the monitors. The light from the screens painted his cheekbones a cold blue. He wore the same shirt as the night before—blood-streaked and wrung out—but clean in a way that made him look more dangerous, not less.
"How do I breathe when something inside me is trying to eat the world?" I snapped.
He didn't flinch. "One second at a time. Count. In for four. Out for six. When you feel the light rising, push it into something small—your palm, a pebble, the air in front of you. Make it do a job. Don't let it think it's a god."
I swallowed and did it anyway. Four, six. Four, six. The presence inside me hummed, annoyed as a caged thing, and I felt it curl its metaphorical lip. But the breath worked—the white edge eased, the heat ebbed.
"Good," he said. "Now push."
Push. My hand clenched into a fist, then opened. A fine mote of pale light hung above my palm like a captured moth. It didn't explode. It didn't lick the drywall. It floated there, obedient as a pet.
"Again," he said. "And this time imagine pain behind it. Control isn't about stopping what you are; it's about choosing when to do it."
We worked until my hands shook and the safehouse clock rolled into the middle of the day. Jase and Martin ran simulations on the monitors—sanitation bots, security camera loops, fake badge swipes. Plans are mostly patience dressed up as urgency, and we had a lot of both.
When the drill ended, Damian stayed with me. He touched the back of my hand—gentle pressure, a tether. "You're improving," he said, not as praise but as fact.
"Improving or becoming weaponized?" I asked.
"Aren't those the same thing for you?" He didn't smile. "We can't pretend you're not a threat—to them and to yourself. But we can make you intentional."
The way he said intentional made my skin bristle. There was tenderness in the tone, but it was wrapped in the kind of practicality that meant a life was bargaining for itself.
We moved from training to planning. Jase pulled up the blueprints for Vale Corp: security nodes, elevator shafts, the vent access that led in behind the server cluster where 34B sat. Martin highlighted the shift rotations, the times when the building's digital heartbeat went softer.
"You get five minutes max in the node," he said. "You have to be in and out, ghost in the machine. If Evelyn's involved, expect a countermeasure. She's not a sloppy player."
We rehearsed the entry like a choreography. I learned to move with silence, to keep my pulse steady, to time breaths with access blips. Oddly, the drills made me feel less like a peon and more like an instrument with a purpose. It was dangerous comfort.
That night, after maps and false alibis and a hundred permutations of what could go wrong, Damian sat across from me with a look I'd seen before when he was about to confess something lethal. "If this goes sideways," he said quietly, "I need you to run. Save yourself first."
"No." The word came out sharp. "I'm not running alone."
"You will if I tell you to," he said, eyes piercing. "Promise me."
"I promise," I lied—because I knew the promise would be brittle when the world shook—but also because the knot in my chest said I'd follow him into the fire even if it meant asking for more ash afterward.
We slept in shifts. I closed my eyes and for once let the safehouse noise lull me. The presence inside me was oddly quiet—the way a predator keeps its breath when it knows the prey has been trapped.
Morning brought concrete plans and coffee-stained maps. It also brought a wrinkle I hadn't expected: Kendra.
She arrived under the pretense of being anxious for gossip, hair perfect, smile sharp. She'd claimed Kendra never slept and had the kind of small talk that scraped like sandpaper. The moment she walked in, the room's temperature altered. She carried herself like someone who'd never been surprised by the sight of money or violence.
"You brought her in," I said, too quick. The words cut the room.
Kendra blinked, offended in a way that looked practiced. "What are you talking about?" she asked. The laugh she gave off was low and wrong for the safehouse. "I'm here for Mr. Vale. I heard—are you all right? I heard about the gala."
Damian's gaze flicked between us. He didn't ask how she had access. He only kept his face neutral and said, "We need to vet you, Kendra. Stay in the common area."
She smiled and stayed, but the air felt like a trapdoor. I couldn't shake the prickling behind my neck. There was something about the way she watched me—curious, hungry, collecting small things she could fold into a later argument.
It wasn't until late afternoon, when the monitors hummed and Jase fed a loop of camera footage from Vale Corp in a last-ditch attempt to find anomalies, that a frame froze that made the blood leave my face.
"It's got motion blur," Jase said, frowning. "But we can pull a still."
He did. The screen resolved into a grainy image of the server corridor outside 34B. The timestamp matched the breach. And there—leaning against the far wall, badge clipped exactly where a mole would let it see light—was Kendra. Her profile was unmistakable, the nose, the chin. She was smiling into a phone, her lips close like she whispered into it.
My hands went cold. The presence inside me whispered, pleased. > Finally: an entrance.
"Pause," Damian said. "Zoom."
The image sharpened. Kendra's face looked like a photograph ripped from a life I'd seen only in passing. I thought of the barbs and offhand cruelty, the times she'd made my workday small. I thought of how easily she'd moved through the crowd at the gala. Betrayal wasn't just political. It was personal, the way a cut is personal.
"Why?" I choked.
"Because she needed to be useful," Damian said. "And because Evelyn, if she's behind this, didn't want to touch the field herself. She used someone expendable—someone who would fold when offered protection." He crushed the image between his fingers, not literally, but the sentiment was there.
"They used me to get to you," I whispered.
"No," he corrected softly. "They used you because they thought you were small—and because you were convenient. They misjudged terror." He looked at me with something that was neither anger nor pity. "Kendra is a conduit. She's been a leak for months. We'll use her as bait."
My stomach dropped. "Bait? You mean—"
"We'll catch her trying for another pass. We'll trace it to Evelyn. We'll have a name. Then we'll break the chain."
The plan sounded clinical. It sounded like justice written in a spreadsheet. But inside my ribs, a different, sharper voice—the presence, hungry for the act of control—chimed in: Or we cut it out now and end the mess faster.
I almost listened. Almost reached for the easy cruelty that would have been satisfying. Then I thought of promises—of my mother's letter, of the ring on my finger that had become less of a shackle and more of a line on a map—and I realized how little I wanted to become the kind of person who burned to prove a point.
"Set the trap," I said instead. "And put the collar on her slow." The words were not kind. They were precise.
Jase tapped the screen, setting motion-triggered cameras and a decoy packet that would ping any device that tried to access 34B tonight. Martin called in favors to have a maintenance crew reroute the patrolling bots through the sector where Kendra usually worked.
As dusk folded the city into bruised velvet, we went through the motions of becoming invisible. Damian handed me a black coat with no markings, gloves, an emergency badge that would allow short-term access to floor 34B with a fabricated pretext: equipment supervision. He pressed it into my hands with a look that meant more than practicality.
"You're not doing this alone," he said.
"I know," I said. I shouldn't have sounded like I meant it, but the ring at my finger throbbed and the presence inside me hummed like a hungry animal waiting for a signal.
Kendra left before we moved out—too early to be innocent. As the safehouse mobilized, Jase mouthed the last piece of the plan: "We'll get a ping when she moves. You and Damian will be on parallel access. If she tries anything, we light up the node and—
—and one way or another, we find Evelyn."
The truck that moved us toward Vale Corp smelled of diesel and dust. I jammed my hands into my pockets and tried to steady the tremor in my fingers. The presence inside me was quiet but alert, like a cat that smelled the bird before hearing it fall.
When the building's lights slid past the vehicle windows and we rolled into the shadow of the corporation that had once seemed so monolithic to me, I realized I was not the only one who'd changed.
I was no longer just Aria Blake, peon. I was the thing they'd come to steal, and tonight I was going to see which of my enemies had the nerve to show their hands.
And if Kendra was their hand, I would see the fingerprints — close and personal.