JULES.
She didn't sleep.
Not because she was scared — Jules didn't do fear. Not like most people. For her, fear was just another tool in the kit. A sensation to tune, test, and tighten.
It was almost midnight when the perimeter feed flickered.
Just once.
Cam 3C — southeast maintenance stairwell. A flick of static. Then normal.
"Nope."
She swung her legs off the bunk and pulled her tablet into her lap, fingers flying across the display. She scrubbed back the footage, frame by frame, until she caught it:
A shadow ducking between the building's side access and the utility crawlspace. Too fast to be random. Too careful to be accidental.
"Got you," she whispered.
She clicked into thermal overlay. Faint red heat signature — human-sized, lingering near the back panel where their sensor lines fed into the external grid.
"And what are you doing back there?"
Zoom. Enhance.
Wires. Bare hands. A small screwdriver held between teeth. Not Brent. Not Eric. Some wiry kid they hadn't seen before.
A scout.
"Amateur," she muttered. "You brought a multitool to a goddamn vault."
Jules descended alone, boots quiet, gun holstered, wrench in her hand. By the time she reached the maintenance corridor, the scout was gone — but the panel was open.
And inside, a clean, surgical slice through one of the redundant sensor loops.
Not enough to shut down the alarm.
Just enough to delay it.
To create a gap.
A window.
"Smart," she said aloud. "Stupid, but smart."
She pulled a compact coil from her side pouch and fed it into the panel — reattaching the dummy wires while installing a secondary override behind the visible layer. Anyone who came back thinking the line was dead would trigger the backup instead.
Then she slipped a pressure-triggered magnesium flare into the dirt-packed insulation seam, just beneath the panel door.
If they came back to finish the job?
They'd be blind for ten minutes.
Maybe longer.
"You want in," she whispered, locking the panel, "you'll have to bleed for it."
She glanced once more at the corner where the scout had knelt.
Then she turned and walked away, not looking back.
--
JOSH.
I was already in the control room when Jules came in — hair damp from a shower, sleeves pushed up, tablet under one arm, and that look in her eyes. The one she wore when she was two moves ahead of a problem she hadn't named yet.
I didn't turn from the monitor.
"You saw something," I said.
"More like someone," she replied, dropping the tablet on the desk beside me. "South panel. Maintenance stairwell. Scout. Small build. Smart fingers."
I shifted the feed and zoomed in on the angle. Nothing there now — just the sealed exterior glinting with solar glaze, undisturbed.
"What did they do?"
"Sliced a secondary sensor loop. Quiet. Would've bought them maybe three minutes of dead zone if we hadn't had redundancies."
"They testing our response time?"
"Maybe. Or laying the ground for a breach."
I finally looked at her.
She didn't flinch. She never did.
"And?"
"I rigged the panel. If they come back to finish it, they'll trigger a magnesium flare right in their face. Ten minutes of blindness, maybe some skin burn. Enough time to alert the rest of the system."
I stared at her for a beat.
"You did it without telling me."
"I did it before I could talk myself out of it."
I stood and ran a hand over my face.
"Okay," I said. "We go live on fallback protocols."
"Already queued."
"Any sign Rosie sent him?"
"They're not moving randomly," she said. "And the only people hungry enough to send scouts are the ones who know we have more than enough to survive. She knows. She's getting ready."
I nodded once.
The kind of nod you give when someone tells you the fire's reached your front yard.
"We hold the line," I said.
"We snare the line," Jules replied.