I wasn't anyone's. Not really. Not when we were walking into a building full of caged children who would look at me and see what I used to be. What I still was, underneath all the jokes and the knives and Rafael's hand finding mine in the dark.
I forced a smile back onto my face before Rafael could notice.
We cleared the immediate tree line, and there was Jasper, waiting for us.
"Five minutes of complete camera blackout," Jasper said. "Then rolling outages in sectors away from our position to draw security attention elsewhere."
"I love when you talk tech to me," Diego quipped, flashing a grin that could probably melt ice at twenty paces. "Your sexy brain is such a turn-on, guapo."
Jasper's murderous glare could have peeled paint off walls.
We moved through the trees in silence now. All the banter had burned away. The snow crunched softly under our boots. Our breath came out in white clouds that disappeared into the darkness.
Then we crested the ridge, and the facility came into view.
My breath stopped.
The facility was smaller than I expected. It was just a low concrete building half-buried in snow, ringed by a chain-link fence and floodlights. No movement. It could have been a weather station or a research outpost, but I knew better.
Somewhere inside that building were children in cages waiting for a rescue.
My hands curled into fists. The knife handles bit into my palms, grounding me, keeping me here in the snow instead of twenty years in the past.
"Lorenzo." Rafael's voice cut through the white noise building in my head. "Stay with me."
I couldn't look at him. I couldn't speak. If I opened my mouth, something would come out that I couldn't take back. I just nodded.
In my peripheral vision, Jasper was already halfway down the slope toward the east entrance. He moved like a man with nothing left to lose.
I sucked in a breath of frozen air and let it burn my lungs.
Time to finish this.
I moved toward theentrance, a heavy metal grate secured with an electronic lock disguised as a standard padlock. Amateur hour. I attached Jasper's bypass device, watching the tiny screen as it cycled through encryption patterns. Three seconds later, the lock disengaged with a satisfying click.
"And we're in," I murmured, easing the grate open just enough for us to slip through. "Remember, straight to the lower level. No detours, no heroics."
The drainage culvert stank of permafrost runoff and minerals leached from ancient ice. That particular brand of Alaskan cold sank into my marrow and refused to leave, even underground. The smell was different here than anywhere else I'd worked, sharper, cleaner somehow despite the rot. The earth itself was frozen too deep to truly decay. I crouched in the shadows, Rafael at my back as we waited for the signal from Jasper.
"Five-minute mark," Rafael whispered, checking his watch. "Cameras should be down... now."
The tiny red light on the security camera above the culvert entrance blinked once and went dark. There's something beautiful about perfect timing, a kind of poetry in synchronized violence that alwaysgives me a little thrill. Jasper might be a creepy bastard who barely spoke, but his tech work was practically art.
"Shall we knock?" I asked with a smile that felt more like baring my teeth than expressing joy.
Rafael nodded, the determination in his eyes reflecting the weak emergency lighting through the grate. "Gently."
"I'm always gentle," I replied.
"That's rich coming from you," Rafael whispered back, following me into the darkness.
The culvert opened into a maintenance tunnel lit by emergency strips that cast everything in a sickly green light. The walls were damp concrete, the floor slick with condensation and ice melt. Our boots made almost no sound. The cold somehow muffled everything, making the world feel wrapped in wool. Ahead, the corridor branched into two smaller passages.
"Left," I said, recalling the blueprints. "Service corridor should lead directly to sublevel two, just outside the children's quarters."
We moved in silence, the only sounds our controlled breathing and the occasional drip of water from the ceiling. My body hummed with the particular electric awareness that came before violence.
The first guard appeared exactly where Jasper's intel said he would be, a lone sentry stationed at the junction between the maintenance tunnel and the proper facility corridors. He never even saw us coming. I slipped up behind him, one hand over his mouth, the other driving my knife into the base of his skull. He went limp instantly, dead before he could process what was happening.
