Chapter 28: The Way Back In
Mira didn't call anyone.
She didn't send warnings or broadcasts or signals meant to be intercepted. Emberlight had spent years learning how to predict fear and desperation.
She gave them neither.
The old facility sat beneath layers of false records and newer construction, hidden in plain sight. Cyan had helped design its blind spots once. Mira remembered every one of them.
Inside, the corridors were unchanged—white, sterile, quiet enough to hear your own breathing. It was the kind of silence meant to erase footsteps.
Mira moved through it like memory made flesh.
Security cameras blinked out as she passed. Locks opened without alarms. Emberlight had grown confident. Confidence always left gaps.
Two levels down, Cyan sat restrained in a glass room, wrists marked red, eyes sharp despite exhaustion.
He looked up when the door hissed open.
For a moment, disbelief flickered across his face.
Then relief.
"Mira," he breathed.
She crossed the room and deactivated the restraints in one smooth motion. "We're leaving."
"You shouldn't be here," he said, even as he stood. "Vale will—"
"I know," she replied. "That's why I came."
Alarms screamed to life.
Vale's voice filled the corridor, calm and controlled. "You always were inefficient, Mira. Emotional attachments compromise outcomes."
She didn't answer him.
Cyan grabbed her hand as security doors began to slam shut ahead of them. "You planned this."
"Yes," she said. "With help."
Lights flickered—Seraph interference rippling through the system. Other Subjects, still free, still listening, had created openings. Small ones. Enough.
They ran.
Shots echoed behind them. Walls scorched. Breath burned.
At the final exit, Mira turned once, looking straight into the camera she knew Vale was watching through.
"You were wrong," she said softly. "This is what survives."
Then they were gone.
Behind them, the facility locked down in chaos.
Ahead of them, the night waited—wide, uncertain, alive.
And for the first time since Emberlight began, something had been taken back.
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