Chapter 121: The Reckoning of Shadows
The war room was unnaturally quiet.
Cambria stood at the head of the obsidian table, her fingers curled tightly around the edges. Maps sprawled before her, soaked in red ink and annotations from the last battle. Her council surrounded her with what was left of it. Evelyn stood to her right, arms folded, eyes unreadable. Lucien Vale stood across from her, watching the daughter he had both saved and doomed with a face carved from stone.
"We lost half the Blackwatch in the northern front," General Carrow reported, voice hoarse. "The perfected Pandora units overwhelmed our defenses. We weren’t prepared for that kind of precision."
Cambria didn’t blink. She had expected this. She had counted every casualty in her mind long before the reports came in.
"The moment Evelyn was revealed as the first key, they were reactivated," she murmured. "Sophia Drake always had a failsafe. And we walked into it."
"Project Echelon has been activated too," Evelyn added. "It’s worse than Pandora. These new units, Subject Five through Nine, don’t need handlers. They’re controlled by a central core. And that core is "
"Knox," Cambria finished.
No one questioned it.
Not anymore.
A silence fell, heavy with realization. Then Lucien spoke, his voice slow and deliberate.
"There’s only one place Knox could be hiding: the central control unit. The Eyrie."