Chapter 249: Cold Recovery
The silence didn’t last.
Not in a place like this.
It broke first with a rattle—the crash cart beside me trembling from the reverberations of a distant, echoing clang. Then came the subtle hum of the overhead lights growing sharper, as if the facility itself had taken a breath. Something in the air shifted. An alert system maybe. Or motion sensors reactivating.
We had seconds, maybe minutes, before someone noticed the guard hadn’t checked in.
"He won’t be out long," Alexis muttered, already moving. She crouched beside the unconscious soldier, pressing two fingers to his throat, then searching the compartments of his armor. "Vitals steady. Nervous system’s overwhelmed. She didn’t just disable him. She short-circuited his ability to move. That shouldn’t be possible."
Sienna remained silent.
I could see it in her posture—the tremble in her knees, the way her breath caught just short of normal. Adrenaline crash. Overexertion. Whatever she did, it took a toll. I wanted to pull her aside, ask if she was really okay. But there was no time.
Alexis tossed a small black card my way. Key clearance.
"He had Tier 2 access," she said. "That’ll open meddoors and staff corridors, maybe even some storage wings. But not the core wings or security grid."
"It’s enough," I replied, gripping the card hard enough to bend it. I turned to Sienna. "Can you walk?"
She nodded, slow. Her voice, when it came, was ragged but resolute. "Yeah. I’m not... falling apart."