The silence in the wake of Croft's offer was more deafening than the alarms had been. The bond between Liam and Kai screamed with a shared, silent NO. But the tactical reality was a nightmare. They were in a sealed vault corridor. Liam had two standard Purifiers with him, confused and now hearing their commander accused of treason. Croft had four of his upgraded, blank-faced enforcers. Marcus and Ren were trapped elsewhere in the building, the sounds of their firefight having ceased.
"Ten seconds," Kai whispered, his eyes glued to the siphon's screen.
Croft sighed, a sound of profound disappointment. "I see. Sentiment over sanity. A fatal flaw the Purge was designed to correct." He gave a slight nod to his lead enforcer. "Neutralize the Echo elements. Retrieve Subject L-14 intact for reset."
The black-armored Purifiers raised their weapons—not standard disruptors, but heavier, barrelled things that hummed with a sinister energy.
Liam's two Purifiers, loyal to the chain of command but utterly out of their depth, hesitated. "Sir…?"
It was the opening.
From the shadowed doorway of a side passage further down the corridor—one of the routes Liam had subtly left unsecured—a new figure erupted. Marcus. He must have fought his way through the shutters. He was bleeding from a graze on his temple, but his movement was a bull's charge.
He didn't fire at Croft. He fired at the ceiling above Croft and his enforcers.
The sonic-charge round detonated against the old stonework. It wasn't an explosion. It was a concussive wave of pure, structural force. The ceiling didn't just crack; it buckled. Massive chunks of decorative plaster and underlying stone rained down.
"KAI! GO!" Marcus bellowed, emptying his magazine at the enforcers to keep their heads down as the world came crashing down between them.
The sacrifice was instantaneous and brutal. One of the falling stone blocks, a gargoyle's severed head, struck Marcus on the shoulder, driving him to his knees. An enforcer, ignoring the debris, snapped off a shot. The humming weapon discharged a bolt of crackling, blue energy. It struck Marcus in the center of his mass. There was no blood. His body…locked. Every muscle seized in a rigid, agonized tetany before he collapsed, smoke rising from his armor.
"MARCUS!" The scream was Ren's. She appeared behind him, her face a mask of pure, shattered fury. She dragged his seizing body back into the side passage, a storm of grief and covering fire.
The collapse had created a temporary, dusty barricade between them and Croft's squad, but it wouldn't hold. The enforcers were already shoving rubble aside.
In the vault, the siphon screen flashed: TRANSFER COMPLETE.
Kai yanked the crystal drive free, clutching it to his chest. His face was ashen, eyes wide with the horror of Marcus's fate. Liam felt the grief rip through their bond, sharp and desolate.
"The culvert!" Liam yelled, shoving the stunned Purifier next to him toward the vault's rear wall. "Your orders are to follow me! Now!"
The authority in his voice broke the chaos, and they hesitated no more. They followed as Liam led a desperate sprint not back into the corridor. Still, deeper into the server vault, to a grille in the floor he'd memorized from the blueprints. He fired three rounds into its hinges, kicked it loose.
"Down!"
Kai went first, dropping into the pungent darkness. Liam's two Purifiers followed, bewildered but compliant. Liam went last, just as the first black-helmeted enforcer shoved through the rubble into the vault.
He dropped into the narrow, slimy culvert, landing in ankle-deep, foul water. "Move! That way!" he pointed away from the archive's primary foundation.
They stumbled, splashed, and ran. Behind them, they heard enforcers dropping into the culvert, their pursuit methodical, unhurried. They had trackers. They had orders.
The culvert forked. Liam shoved the two Purifiers down the left branch. "Draw them off! That's an order! Report hostile pursuit to Ryker's position!"
The agents, trained to obey, peeled away, their footsteps echoing.
Liam grabbed Kai's arm and pulled him down the right fork. "This way."
They ran until their lungs burned, the only light from Liam's helmet lamp bouncing off the curved, dripping walls. The sounds of pursuit faded, diverted. After what felt like an eternity, they saw a sliver of grey pre-dawn light—a rusted-out grille leading to a scum-covered canal bank.
They burst out into the cold, open air, gasping, filthy. The archive was a dark silhouette in the distance. Sirens now converged on it from all over the sector.
Kai slumped against a crumbling wall, the data drive clutched so tightly his knuckles were white. He was trembling, not from cold, but from shock. "Marcus… he…"
"I know," Liam said, his own breath coming in ragged pulls. The bond carried the raw edge of Kai's grief, mixing with his own cold fury and a crushing guilt. He had manipulated the pieces on the board, but Marcus had made the sacrifice—a good man, for a truth they now carried in a stolen crystal.
Kai looked at him, his grey eyes hollow. "Your men…"
"They'll be captured or killed. Croft will list them as casualties of my betrayal." The weight of it settled on him. There was no going back. He was a traitor—a fugitive. The top Purifier was now the Directorate's most wanted.
He reached up, ripped his helmet off, and then, with a snarl of pure defiance, tore the neural modulator from his temple. It came free with a sting of pain and a spray of tiny sparks. He hurled the dead piece of technology into the filthy canal. It sank without a trace.
The world didn't end. The sky didn't fall. Instead, the dull, ever-present hum that had been the background of his adult life vanished. The silence in his own head was terrifying, and vast, and… free.
He felt the bond with Kai not as a filtered, moderated signal, but as a clear, bright channel. He felt Kai's grief, his fear, his resolve. And beneath it, a flicker of awe as he watched Liam discard his cage.
"What now?" Kai asked, his voice a hoarse whisper.
Liam looked at the data drive, then at the city beginning to wake under its blanket of control. He thought of Lily, a name that was now a living, breathing person in Croft's grasp. He thought of the two Purifiers he'd just sent as decoys. He thought of Marcus, falling.
He met Kai's eyes. In them, he saw the reflection of the boy from the blue wall, and the man who had just lost everything to bring him here.
"Now," Liam Thorne said, the first words of his new life, "we run."