The mornings here were different.
Not cold, not sterile, not sharp with artificial light—but soft.
The sun, real and gold-edged, seeped through the cracked panes of an old greenhouse roof, casting broken mosaics across the floor. Vines had crept up the walls. Somewhere beyond the fences, she could hear insects, the low rustle of wild grass reclaiming concrete.
Lina flexed her right hand—still stiff, still foreign—and watched how the morning light caught along the fine silver seams.
Three days since she woke up. Maybe four.
It was hard to tell here, where the days drifted slow and unmeasured, like dust floating through the air.
Ash Light operated in the remains of what had once been a research station—something Elya had mentioned in passing, back when the days still blurred together.
Solar panels patched together with salvaged wiring, water cisterns feeding into cracked irrigation lines, broken soil painstakingly coaxed into life again.
Nothing wasted. Nothing forgotten.
She could breathe here.
But breathing wasn't enough.
Not when every breath came with the same hollow ache—the memory of the house falling apart, of Kai turning away, of the floor cracking beneath her.
She needed answers.
She pulled her coat tighter around her shoulders, the old rebel insignia rough against her fingers, and stepped out into the open air.
The wind smelled of sun-warmed dust and something sweeter—old herbs, maybe, or the stubborn green things growing between shattered concrete slabs.
Overhead, the sky stretched wide and blue, framed by the broken ribs of the greenhouse and the jagged silhouette of a distant radio tower.
At the doorway, a figure waited—
Elya, leaning casually against the frame, a battered diagnostic pad tucked under one arm.
"You're up early," Elya said, with a small, almost reluctant smile.
"Didn't feel like waiting," Lina muttered.
Elya glanced her over, not with a doctor's critical eye, but something quieter. Measuring, maybe.
She tipped her head toward the open yard.
"Come on," she said. "Stretch your legs a bit. Easier to breathe when you're moving."
Lina hesitated—for a second—then followed.
They moved through the cracked pathways together, boots striking against reinforced plates set into old concrete.
Stabilization grids laced the worst breaches—thin polymer mesh laid clean across the ground, flexing under pressure but refusing to break.
Solar rigs loomed along the ridge lines, larger arrays mounted on modular braces. The surfaces gleamed under morning light—not fractured mirrors, but panels welded and recalibrated by hand, precise and stubborn.
"Grid's holding stable," Elya said, nodding toward a junction box where braided cables fed into a relay tower. "Comms, water, heating arrays. Backup cells ready if the main charge dips."
Beyond the power lines, a low structure stretched across the central yard—modular walls, insulated seams, overhead plating rigged to absorb kinetic impacts. Half-buried antenna nodes blinked faintly, tracking the sky in slow arcs.
In the distance, two compact surveillance drones spun lazy circles over the perimeter—silent but visible if you knew how to look.
A few figures moved around the yard:
checking relay feeds, overhauling stripped-down transports, sliding fresh mag cells into weapons cradled in mobile repair racks.
Operators.
Not militia.
Lina caught a glimpse of the training pit beyond—
Past the comms sector, a training ring sprawled open to the sun—split between impact foam and hardened ground.
One fighter moved inside: short spear in tight spiral arcs, footwork clipped and aggressive.
Another trained alone, resetting the sighting on a battered but tuned-up energy rifle, motion slow and deliberate.
A reinforced armory loomed nearby, its doors sealed but half-open to reveal rows of low-grade kinetic armor, modular weapon frames, and dismantled drone kits stacked in efficient columns.
"We don't waste," Elya said, voice steady. "What we can't buy, we salvage. What we can't salvage, we fabricate."
She gestured toward a half-sunken shelter where two operators hunched over a low-slung manufacturing rig—printer arms threading polymer-laced rounds, wiring detonator fuses into hand-built casings.
"Workshop units," she added. "Enough to keep us supplied. Barely."
She didn't say it like a complaint.
Simply a fact of life.
They passed a row of hydroponic gardens—vertical racks humming quietly, fat-leafed greens and root vegetables climbing under faint light bands.
Beyond that, remnants of an old greenhouse stretched skyward—patched with sealant mesh, its frame reinforced into something less beautiful but far more enduring.
A microturbine hummed on the western rise, catching highland winds, feeding supplemental power into the grid with a low, steady whine.
No wasted space. No wasted time.
She barely noticed when her hand brushed a flowering vine spiraling up a steel strut—bioengineered for resilience, not aesthetics.
"Still growing," Elya murmured. "This place remembers what it was... even if nothing else does."
Lina didn't ask for details.
She already knew how those stories ended.
She tucked her hands into her jacket pockets, kept her head down, and kept moving.
Not all the eyes she passed were welcoming.
Some looked past her without seeing.
Some cut sideways, quick and sharp, before returning to work.
She felt it in the way conversation dipped as she crossed the yard, in the brief, loaded silence that followed her steps.
A reminder:
She was a stranger here.
Ahead, the comms building rose clean against the slope—sharp-edged and newly sealed, its surface a lattice of matte composite plates still untouched by rust or wear.
The seams were precision-welded, the outer frame reinforced with shock-dampeners and signal baffles—military-grade, not salvaged.
Behind it, the main antenna tower gleamed faintly under the rising light, anchored into the rock with tension cables so new they still held a chemical sheen.
Everything about it said one thing: someone had invested in making sure this place could not fall.
Her focus locked on it.
Senn would be inside.
Waiting.
Someone owed her the truth.
The door slid open on a soft magnetic lock, cool air brushing past her as Lina stepped inside.
Senn's workspace was nothing like the yard outside—
It was colder.
Sharper.
Maps covered the far wall—projection panels laid flush against composite sheets, backlit in thin, steady pulses. A full layout of the installation sprawled across them: sector grids numbered one through nine, their perimeters traced in color-coded lines.
Sector 9 had been marked over and over—red circles, hashed notes, small clusters of pinned counters pressed hard enough to leave faint dents in the surface.
Opposite the maps, a whiteboard hung low under dim strip-lights.
It wasn't a pristine officer's board.
It was chaotic—battle plans layered over each other in different inks, arrows and timings annotated in short, precise handwriting.
And in the lower right corner, half-erased but still visible under the glare: a voting grid.
Tally marks lined up in uneven rows, some smudged by a careless sleeve or deliberate hand.
Not everyone agreed with the last plan.
But a decision had been made anyway.
The rest of the room was stripped bare—one utilitarian desk, two chairs, a battered terminal rigged into the wall with a spiderweb of uplink cables.
No personal items. No insignia.
Nothing to betray sentiment.
Senn stood by the map wall, one hand braced against the frame, eyes tracking the slow rotation of an updated feed—sector security sweeps blinking into sequence.
He didn't turn when she entered.
Only said, voice even:
"You came further than I expected."
Lina stepped into the room like it owed her something. Her jacket still zipped against the lingering chill.
"You sent the message," she said. "I'm here."
Senn didn't answer immediately.
The soft clicks of map overlays shifting filled the room, like the slow ticking of some hidden clock.
He turned, gaze sweeping over her once—clinical, assessing—and paused for half a beat on the insignia stitched into her coat.
Sword and rifle, crossed sharp and proud.
If he felt anything at the sight, it didn't show.
"I did," he said at last, voice low, unhurried.
He crossed the room in a few slow steps, tapping a control node on the projection wall. The sectors flickered, lines sharpening.
"The comms went dark three days ago," he said, "No confirmed survivors. Just a few scattered pings—nothing solid."
He hesitated—a flicker.
"We didn't have the manpower to counterstrike. I wish I had better news."
"However, we are planning to send a recon team next month," he said quietly. "Small crew. Low-risk insertion. Just to confirm what was left."
He tapped the map wall once—Sector 9 pulsing under his hand.
"The assaults did not look random," he added, voice steady but stripped of anything resembling comfort. "Targets were hit fast. Surgical. Positions that should have been buried under signal static."
The map's glow pulsed again—Sector lines flickering red along a sweeping arc.
"From Sector 5 to 9," he continued, quieter now, "we'd been watching. Reinforcing fallback points. Kai flagged it early—weeks ago. Said Sector 9 was being watched, targeted. The kind of thing you don't ignore. That's why we came."
Lina stared at the map. Sector 9 still pulsed, red and slow.
"You were watching it burn," she said, quieter now. "You were close."
Senn didn't deny it.
"We were already tracking energy drift across the grid," he said. "Deployment schedules, satellite gaps—something was building. We were set to reposition. When the signal hit, we adjusted. We waited on the ridge until the window opened."
He looked away briefly.
"But the perimeter was sealed before we made contact."
Lina's breath came short. Controlled. Too controlled.
"You were outside," she said. "And you didn't come in."
Her voice cracked, but not with grief—with something sharper.
"You didn't even try."
Senn's jaw shifted.
"We didn't have the numbers. And the Seraphs weren't leaving gaps. It was an execution grid, not a raid."
"But you got me out," she snapped.
"One name," she said. "That's what justified the risk."
She stepped forward, eyes locked on him now.
"So why only me?"
Senn met her gaze, steady.
"Because that's all we were requested," he said quietly, "I don't know why he chose you. I only know he did. And we chose to trust him."
She didn't wait for him to answer.
Her eyes locked onto the map—Sector 9 still pulsing.
"Why?" she asked. "And why the hell would Church forces come after Sector 9? It's barely a node—off-grid, low profile. We weren't even running major ops."
Her voice had an edge now—sharp, not panicked, but pressing.
"They don't deploy Seraph-class unless they're making a statement. So what the hell were we supposed to be?"
Senn's gaze didn't leave the map.
"We've been asking the same thing," he said. "And you're right—Sector 9 shouldn't have mattered."
A pause. His jaw tightened slightly.
"Which means it wasn't about what you were doing. It was about who was there."
Another tap on the map—this time not Sector 9, but the broader sweep across neighboring zones.
"They hit intel clusters. Field med cores. Comms nodes. Not just assets—archives."
He looked at her, eyes unreadable.
"Someone wanted to erase something. Or someone. We… we don't know what. Not for sure"
He didn't offer more. Stood there, silent long enough to make it obvious.
Lina said nothing, but she didn't look away.
Senn exhaled—short, controlled.
He tapped the console again.
A clipped audio file blinked to life—no visuals, just sound. The waveform stuttered once before steadying, static pulsing low beneath the voice that followed.
"If she makes it out..."
A pause. Rough breathing.
"...get her clear of Nine. Fast. You hear me?"
Another pause. Faint clicks—maybe from gear, or pain, or both.
"Tell Senn he owes me."
A beat.
"Twice."
The file cut out.
Senn's hand lingered briefly over the control console, fingers tensed just enough to betray the calm he'd worked so hard to maintain. His gaze was fixed, distant—not on the blinking sector map but on something beyond it. Memories, perhaps. Debts unpaid.
When he spoke again, his voice was quieter, stripped raw.
"That's all we got," he said finally, not meeting her eyes. "He went dark after that."
He didn't mention the rest either.
Didn't say how the pursuit patterns—the search grids tightening from Aurelion's soldiers across the badlands—had matched her last known route too precisely to be chance.
Didn't say that the extraction orders had come through with timing too clean to be coincidence.
Some truths, Senn knew, had to come later.
When the ground was more stable beneath her feet.
Lina's stomach twisted, but she kept her stance locked.
Senn continued, voice flat: "Kai made the last contact before the blackouts started. Short-range burst transmission. He asked... that we extract you."
The way he said it—that we extract you—was deliberate. As if she were a valuable asset, not a person.
"He believed you'd be a target," Senn added, shifting a piece on the map—Sector 9, drawn over in thick, repeated strokes.
"He saved Ash Light before," Senn said quietly, almost an afterthought. "We owed him."
He didn't mention the second debt. Not yet. Perhaps he couldn't.
He let the words settle, not rushing to fill the silence.
"That's why you're here," he finished.
Another map layer blinked active—heat signatures clustering along Sector 9's southern breach.
He looked back at her, and for the first time, there was something harder in his eyes.
"You can stay," he said. "Work with us. Help stabilize this sector while we re-establish long-range links. Once we have a clear channel, I'll prioritize getting a message through."
Lina frowned, searching his face for any crack, any opening.
But Senn was stone. Solid, unyielding.
"And if they don't answer?" she asked.
Senn watched her in the quiet that followed—
no anger, no desperation in her voice. Just steady, stripped-down need.
Stronger than he'd expected.
"If they don't," Senn said, voice steady, "you'll still be safer here than out there."
Lina met his eyes.
"And I'm just supposed to trust you?"
"At the very least," he said, "we pulled you out when no one else did."
His hand, still resting lightly against the map console, tightened for a fraction of a second before relaxing again.
A tiny, betrayed hesitation.
"You're not field-ready yet," he said, tone clinical by effort, not instinct. "But that can change."
He looked away briefly, as if the maps were suddenly more important, then back at her—face shuttered, but voice just a fraction softer.
Before she could answer, he straightened slightly, squaring his stance.
"And we can't afford to waste anyone," he finished, colder now, locking the words into place like a closing gate.
On the wall, Sector 9 pulsed steadily—impossible to ignore.
Lina said nothing.
Just gave a short, tight nod—the kind that cost more than it showed.
Then she turned, boots striking the floor with muted force, and left the room without waiting for dismissal.
The corridors outside were half-lit and empty, steel walls bearing concrete scars.
She walked until she found a dead maintenance alcove where the light strips flickered and died.
There, in the flicker-shadow gloom, she stopped.
Pressed her forehead against the cold steel.
For one second, she was still.
Then—
"Fuck," she hissed.
The word broke out of her like a cracked bone.
"Fuck. Fuck. Fuck—"
Each one louder than the last.
She slammed her fist against the wall—once, twice—didn't care about the noise.
"You left them," she spat, not sure if she meant Senn or herself or the damn system.
"You left all of us."
She pressed the heel of her hand into her eyes, breathing like she'd just climbed out of rubble.
Then straightened.
She didn't stop shaking.
But she stood.