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“So you just let all the prisoners out and gave the guards a reason to lock the place down. In about sixty seconds, the AI is going to classify every non-guard in this place as a live target.”

He shrugged. “That’s not new.”

I bit down hard, tried not to scream. “We could reprogram it. Turn it on the guards, or at least give the prisoners a fighting chance. But I need access to the core. You have a password?”

He shook his head, not in negation but in frustration. “They keep it isolated. Only accessible through the command node.”

I scanned the room, eyes landing on a lonely workstation in the far corner—separate from the main console, monitor still on, the glow of a single login prompt painting the air above it a sickly green.

“That it?” I asked, already moving.

The workstation was old, Authority-era, but someone had tried to upgrade it—a bundle of new wires trailing from the back, a cheap plastic thumbprint reader taped to the front of the chassis. I slid into the chair, fingers already dancing over the keyboard. The login screen was a joke; I bypassed it with a simple shell exploit, then paged through the root directory for the defense software.

Kang hovered behind me, breath hot on my neck. “You really know how to do this?”

“I know how to do a lot of things,” I snapped.

The software was ugly, a layer-cake of hard-coded rules and last-minute patches. I picked through the variables, searching for the decision tree that sorted guards from prisoners. My pulse was pounding so hard it blurred the text, every keystroke feeling like a countdown tick. If I mistyped, the system would lock me out—game over.

“That’s it,” I said, clicking through to the override.

Kang squinted at the screen. “You can reclassify the guards as hostile?”

“I can reclassify everyone as hostile, if I want. But what I’m going to do is set a delay—twenty seconds, just enough to let the prisoners get clear. After that, anyone in Authority blue becomes a target.”

He nodded, once. “Do it.”

Ityped, hard and fast, muttering under my breath. The technical jargon came naturally—recursive loop, kill command, buffer overflow. The code took in the first try, which meant someone else had been in here before me. That should have rattled me, but it only made my hands move faster.

On the main display, the fight in D block went from one-sided to something primal. The prisoners had learned to move as a mass, overwhelming the Authority phalanx by pure momentum. In the smoke, I caught flashes of jumpsuits, the oily gleam of plastic sheeting, the dark blue-black of Authority armor turned on its wearer.

In the foreground, a figure sprinted to the front of the mob. Stitch. Laundry cord in one hand, broken porcelain in the other. She took a rifle shot to the side—kept going, vaulted the line, dragged a guard down with her bare hands. The crowd swallowed him whole.

I laughed, a choked, ugly sound. Kang raised an eyebrow.

“Stitch,” I said. “She’s a maniac, and my only friend in here.”

He watched the monitor, then nodded. “She’ll die for that.”

“Not if I can help it.”

We scrolled through other feeds. I saw a woman with an arm twisted the wrong way wrap it around a guard’s neck and pop his trachea like a piece of wet celery. In the med bay, a pair of wounded prisoners barricaded the doors with wheeled gurneys, then set fire to the bedding. The smoke poured out, black and violent.

Even the yard had gone to hell. I watched a line of inmates drag a guard up onto the chain link, then drop him headfirst onto the concrete below. His helmet came off midair, spinning like a coin.

I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. It was like seeing my own insides turned out.

Kang snapped his fingers. “We need to move. Ten minutes, then this room becomes a kill box.”

I ignored him, flipping to one last feed—admin corridor. Petrov was there, flanked by two riot guards. He moved fast, gesturing at the doors, checking his watch every five seconds. The look on his face was pure calculation. He wasn’t scared. He was taking notes.

I spat at the screen. “fucking bastard.”

Kang’s face was hard, unreadable.

A pause, just long enough for the panic to catch up. Then the lights cut to red. A siren blared, not the fake one from before—this was the real Authority emergency, the sound designed to make your nerves turn to liquid.

Kang grabbed my arm. “Now. Run.”