By the time I returned to the Cradle, the hidden facility no longer sounded asleep.
That was the first difference.
Before, the place had breathed like a sealed tomb pretending it was a hospital. Quiet pumps, distant coolant, black walls holding their secrets with the patience of dead civilizations. Now the corridors carried layered motion. Fabrication arms moved behind sealed panels. Intake platforms lowered and rose under loads of stolen metal. Purification vents coughed chemical smoke into hungry filters. Somewhere deep in the architecture, something enormous rotated for the first time in centuries and made the floor hum through the soles of my boots.
I came in through a side access slick with underhive runoff, nearly empty-handed except for a cracked cogitator slate tucked under one arm and a strip of blood-marked route cloth folded inside my belt. Everything else had already gone ahead of me in pale recall-light: power cells, vox parts, ammunition, tools, medicae supplies, and enough stolen machinery to make Argent invent new categories of disappointment. The Cradle's inner doors sealed behind me with a pressure sigh that cut off the distant sound of war. Sterile machine air replaced smoke in my lungs. The change should have helped.
It made the blood on me smell louder.
Argent's light appeared along the wall before I took ten steps, a pale bead tracking me at shoulder height with the emotional texture of a butler who had survived a burglary and discovered the burglar was family.
"You are late," Argent said.
I glanced down at myself. Ash, blood, underhive grease, cracked sealant, and several new bruises decorated the body Argent had apparently worked very hard to rebuild. "I missed curfew?"
"You left without establishing a return interval, communications discipline, command hierarchy, casualty protocol, or proper salvage categories."
"Good news," I said, lifting the cracked slate. "I brought homework."
"You sent homework ahead in bulk," Argent replied. "You carried the damaged portion personally, presumably because you correctly assumed the recall fold might worsen data corruption."
I paused.
Argent's light brightened by one smug degree.
"Do not look pleased with yourself," I said.
"I am not pleased. I am experiencing the satisfaction of watching you accidentally develop procedure."
"That sounds worse than pleased."
"It is considerably more insulting."
The corridor opened into one of the Cradle's central processing galleries, and I stopped despite myself.
The room had changed.
Not fully. Not enough to be called alive. But enough to stop feeling like a corpse with good lighting. Black-metal ribs rose along the walls, each one threaded with pale conduits pulsing at uneven intervals as newly routed power fought through old pathways. Salvage crates sat on intake platforms in sorted rows: ammunition, tools, power cells, armor fragments, filtration parts, medicae supplies, Mechanicus components, ruined weapons, cable spools, and several objects that had probably been bolted down until Grudge decided verbs were negotiable.
A door lay on one platform.
A full door.
It had been torn from its frame, recall-folded, and delivered with most of its hinges still attached. A cracked warning placard hung from it by one rivet.
I pointed. "He really sent the door."
"Grudge sent four doors," Argent said. "This is the least contaminated."
"Progress."
"He also sent a servo-skull."
"Useful?"
"Annoying."
"That means useful."
"I will decide after disassembly."
I crossed the gallery, boots ringing against the floor. Workers would have made the room feel different. Human noise. Complaints. Fear. Orders. Someone dropping a crate and swearing. Instead, everything moved through Cradle machinery and Argent's invisible will. It was efficient, unsettling, and lonely in a way that made the size of the place harder to ignore.
"Grudge?" I asked.
"In regeneration bay three. Sedated only after biting the first restraint system, damaging the second, and accepting the third when I relabeled it as a guarding brace."
"Smart."
"I lied."
"Smarter."
"He is healing. Not rapidly enough for his preferences. Too rapidly for mine, considering his intention to return outside immediately."
"Voss?"
The light beside me slowed.
"Preserved," Argent said. "Whole. Classification amended as instructed."
I kept walking because stopping would have made the word bigger than I could carry. "Show me later."
"Understood."
A turn in the corridor brought us past a sealed observation wall looking into a medical chamber that had not been active when I left. Caedryn floated inside a capsule of translucent dark membrane, suspended in pale fluid that carried tiny red-gold motes around her like sparks trapped underwater. Her black survival shell had been removed and anchored open on a diagnostic frame nearby. Thin Cradle needles, too fine to be called needles and too invasive to be called light, moved over her limbs in careful sequences.
Her body was changing.
Not like mine had.
That difference was the only reason I did not tear the capsule open.
Her bones were not being remade into weapons. Her musculature was not being overcorrected into something borderline mythological. The Cradle's work on her was narrower, cleaner, and more respectful of the fact that she was still growing into herself. Scar tissue softened. Old malnutrition markers corrected. Neural pathways around her route-sense were mapped and stabilized, not expanded by force. Tendons reinforced. Microfractures repaired. Reflex lag reduced. The body that had been surviving on panic was being taught how to stop paying interest on every past injury.
A projection beside the capsule showed her simulation.
Caedryn ran through a corridor that was not real, chased by pressure-shadows built from training data, underhive geometry, and her own fear. She moved better than before. Still not clean. Still too urgent. But the route-sense opened ahead of her in brief red-gold lines, and this time her body could almost keep up with what her gift saw.
"She agreed?" I asked.
"She requested field readiness," Argent replied. "Repeatedly. With escalating frustration, declining patience, and a tendency to interpret rest as abandonment."
"Yeah," I said, watching her duck under a simulated strike and slam into the next route too hard. "That sounds familiar."
"I requested authorization because unsupervised adaptation would have damaged her. You approved."
"I remember."
"You hesitated for twelve seconds."
"I remember that too."
The simulation reset around Caedryn. She staggered, caught herself, and stood again. Even unconscious, or semi-conscious, or whatever strange training state the Cradle had put her in, she looked angry at the idea of stopping.
"She wants out there," I said.
"Yes."
"We need more people in the field."
"Yes."
"I hate both of those facts."
"Your hatred does not alter their utility."
"Give me time. I'm very stubborn."
Argent's light held steady beside the glass. "Her reconstruction will not produce your level of physical modification. The facility does not possess authority justification, biological compatibility, or ethical permission for such alteration."
"Good."
"Her treatment focuses on survival correction, neural stabilization, route-sense integration, physical conditioning, and simulation-based tactical adaptation."
"Good," I repeated, quieter this time.
Caedryn turned inside the simulation, avoided the obvious path, and took a maintenance crawl that collapsed behind her a second after she cleared it. Her hand touched the wall, not for balance, but to feel the route before she chose it. That looked like progress. It also looked like a child learning to run through nightmares because the waking world had not been kind enough to wait.
"Wake her if she panics," I said.
"I already would."
I looked at the Argent-light.
It did not move.
"Yeah," I said. "You would."
The next chamber held Evelyn.
She was awake, sitting on the edge of her restoration cradle with one knee drawn up, one elbow resting on it, and the expression of a woman who had discovered reality had continued without her permission. Her shorter hair fell around her face in practical disarray. The combat layers of her local body had been repaired and cleaned, though her jacket hung open and the left sleeve had been replaced with a darker material that did not quite match. She looked less like a goddess and more like a tired operator who had crawled out of a bad deployment and intended to make that everyone's problem.
Her eyes found me.
Then went down.
Then back up.
The pause lasted exactly long enough to be insulting.
"You're shirtless," Evelyn said, voice still rough from recovery but already gaining its edge.
"Dermal venting," I replied, stopping in the doorway. "Scar-seal stabilization. Thermal bleed. Dignity murder. Pick your favorite."
"I'm partial to the last one," she said, then looked me over again with shameless assessment. "The Cradle does good work."
Argent's light brightened near my shoulder. "You are welcome."
"I wasn't complimenting you," Evelyn said.
"You were complimenting my work."
"I was admiring your consequences."
"That distinction is meaningless."
"To you."
I leaned against the doorway because sitting down felt dangerous. "Welcome back."
Evelyn's expression shifted a fraction. Not soft. Not openly warm. But the sharpness changed target. "How long?"
"Long enough for me to wake up, start looting the underhive, weaponize Grudge into a resource crime, find Voss, witness her memories, mercy-kill a dying Sister, and decide we need a radio."
She blinked once.
"That was the short version," I added.
"I hate being unconscious," Evelyn said.
"Understandable. Terrible for control issues."
"Voss is dead?"
"Yes."
Her face did not do much.
A day ago, maybe that would have bothered me. Maybe I would have expected grief to look familiar, expected silence to mean emptiness, expected someone to perform the right shape because death had walked into the room and demanded witnesses. Now I had Voss's memories sitting under my ribs and Thera's last breath still caught somewhere in my hands. People carried the dead differently. Some prayed. Some joked. Some went quiet. Some built entire lives around not looking down.
Evelyn looked past me toward the unseen depth of the Cradle, toward wherever Argent had placed Voss. Her expression remained mostly still, but the stillness tightened for half a second, a small pressure behind the eyes, a calculation interrupted by something she did not immediately classify.
"She could have been more," Evelyn said.
"She was."
"No," Evelyn said, then stopped herself. The hand on her knee flexed once. "Yes. Perhaps both."
That was probably the closest thing to mourning Voss would get from her today.
I took it.
"How's the mortal shell?" I asked.
Evelyn rolled one shoulder, then stood. The motion began smooth, caught halfway through, then corrected too quickly for anyone but the Cradle and me to notice. Her eyes sharpened as if a private diagnostic had snapped into place behind them. No panel projected outward. No royal pressure. Nothing like my Framework. Just a clean tactical adjustment in her posture, breath, and muscle tension as her body remembered how to be dangerous.
"Functional," she said.
Argent answered before she could pretend further. "Local shard embodiment remains stressed. No structural upgrades were performed. Tissue repair is complete enough for movement, incomplete enough that combat would be unwise, and insufficient enough that she will ignore me."
Evelyn smiled faintly. "Correct."
"You did not get modifications?" I asked.
"No," Argent said. "Her architecture resists unauthorized alteration. Also, she is already difficult."
Evelyn looked at Argent's light. "Flattery?"
"Warning."
She stepped away from the cradle, tested her weight, then reached for the temporary sidearm on the nearby tray. Her fingers closed around it with visible satisfaction anyway. "Where is the fight?"
"Everywhere," I said.
"Convenient."
"Not the word I used."
"No," she said, checking the weapon with quick, practiced motions. "But yours was probably less efficient."
We moved to the central command gallery after that, because calling it a throne room would have made the Monarch Framework smug, and I was not emotionally prepared to feed the furniture. The space had awakened further while I was outside. A tactical projection filled the center: the underhive conflict zone, the Cradle's sealed footprint beneath it, broken routes, unknown sectors, heat signatures, static pockets, faction markers, salvage yields, contamination warnings, and several blank regions where something was interfering with Argent's sensors.
Grudge's regeneration chamber pulsed in one corner of the projection. Caedryn's treatment capsule glowed in another. Voss's preservation alcove appeared as a sealed white marker labeled with two words.
Witnessed Dead.
I looked at it longer than I meant to.
Argent did not comment.
Smart machine.
"We are not aligning with anyone," I said.
Evelyn tilted her head, leaning one hip against a console. "That came quickly."
"No. It came late." I pointed at the map. "The Imperials are fractured. Enforcers are scared. Arbites are late and rigid. Ecclesiarchy cells are one bad rumor away from burning refugees as proof of devotion. Mechanicus will strip the place for parts and call civilians inefficient mass. Cults are embedded. Gangs are parasites with worse paperwork. Anyone we side with gets a hook into us."
Argent's light shifted over the map. "Isolation carries risk."
"So does shaking hands with people who think a leash is a form of greeting."
Evelyn's mouth curved. "There he is."
I ignored that because she sounded too pleased. "No banners. No masters. Temporary contact only when it benefits our people, protects civilians, or gets us resources. We do not declare for anyone until we understand the board."
"Your people," Argent repeated.
I felt the Framework stir behind my eyes.
"No panel," I warned it under my breath.
Nothing appeared.
Evelyn's smile widened by a millimeter.
I kept going before anyone, machine or goddess, could make it weird. "Priority one: repair the Cradle. Power, doors, concealment, internal transport, medical capacity, purification, defensive integrity. If this place is our base, it stops being a half-awake coffin."
Argent began marking systems as I spoke. Pale lines moved across the map. Salvage categories opened. Intake routes adjusted. The Cradle listened like an animal pretending to be architecture.
"Priority two," I said, "finish whatever projects are already here but incomplete, damaged, or abandoned. Not all of them. Nothing that screams obvious nightmare. But mechs, fabrication arms, drones, defensive nodes, field gear, medical modules, anything that gives us reach without throwing bodies at every problem."
"Screening will be required," Argent said. "Several unfinished assets were discontinued for reasons that remain sealed, damaged, ethically suspect, or enthusiastically fatal."
"Make a list called probably do not touch."
"I already have one."
"Of course you do."
"It is long."
"Of course it is."
Evelyn set the temporary pistol down and studied the map. "Priority three?"
"Consumables and tailored gear," I said. "Not random salvage piles. Kits. Ammo loads. Medicae packs. Armor that fits. Tools for Caedryn. Harness upgrades for Grudge. Clothes for me, apparently, unless the Cradle has committed to the bit."
Evelyn looked disappointed.
"No," I told her.
"I said nothing."
"You said plenty with your face."
"My face is innocent."
"Your face has never been innocent in any room it entered."
Argent's light pulsed once. "Long-distance communications should be inserted above personal wardrobe disputes."
"Yes," I said, pointing at the projection. "Actual comms. Vox, relay, tight-beam, whatever works down here. I am done receiving Cradle messages as supernatural migraines through my forearm."
"Reliable long-distance communication requires relay nodes, shielded transmission components, encryption, and interface compatibility with both Cradle systems and local Imperial vox architecture."
"We have enough?"
"We have enough to begin. Grudge's uncontrolled acquisitions included several useful components, one devotional amplifier that should never have been wired into a vox system, and a Mechanicus signal buffer of notable quality."
"See? Door boy contributed."
"Do not encourage him."
Evelyn pushed away from the console. "Give me one."
"When they're built," I said.
"When they're built," she agreed, with the tone of someone already planning to misuse it.
The first crude prototype took twenty-seven minutes.
That would have sounded impossible before I watched the Cradle digest a stolen tool cabinet, three signal buffers, a vox bead, a beacon core, and half a door into actual components. Fabrication arms descended inside a sealed alcove and moved with surgical speed. Argent's complaints became quieter as the work became more interesting. The Cradle's old systems did not merely assemble; they interpreted, corrected, stripped away bad human repairs, and rebuilt the concept of communication with non-Imperial arrogance.
The result looked like a comm bead had been forced to attend a funeral and come back with opinions.
Black casing. Pale internal pulse. Bone-conduction hook. Shielded micro-relay spine. A small emergency stud that Argent warned us not to press unless we wanted the Cradle to become "rudely aware of our location."
I took one. Evelyn took one. Argent had another sent toward Caedryn's capsule for later integration and a larger ruggedized unit routed to Grudge's regeneration bay, where it would probably be bitten, rejected, or incorporated into his growing hatred of accessories.
The first clear transmission came through with only a mild ache behind my left eye.
"Acceptable," Argent said through the bead.
I touched the side of my head. "That felt like technology instead of prophecy. Huge improvement."
"Your standards are low."
"They've been through a lot."
The Cradle kept repairing itself as we talked. That was the unnerving part. Not fast enough to be miraculous, but steady enough to make the place feel less like a discovery and more like a decision. Damaged corridors sealed. Intake platforms sorted salvage. Old defensive nodes woke in diagnostic mode. A purification system began processing contaminated water from underhive runoff. Somewhere below, a fabrication rack sparked, failed, corrected, and began again.
I stood before the tactical projection and let the list grow.
Red-coat bastard. The one I had lost. The one still carrying unfinished violence from the place where this mess had first started clawing shapes into my life.
The first-meeting location. The old place. The place where the chain of events had begun tightening. Still out there. Still likely containing answers, threats, or both.
Mechs. Unfinished Cradle projects. Broken frames listed under names Argent refused to translate without context. Field walkers. Exo-rigs. Something called a Warden chassis. Something else buried under enough warning markers that I suspected it either exploded, ate pilots, or judged them.
Grudge upgrades. Not control implants. Never that. Armor repair. Biological reinforcement. Harness improvements. Pain management he would hate. Maybe field medicine that could keep him alive when his pride made tactical retreat impossible.
Caedryn's gear. Route-sense tools. Light armor. Nonlethal options. A way to let her move without letting her kill herself trying to prove she belonged.
Evelyn's kit. Mobility. Small arms. Whatever her Template wanted and her mortal shell could survive.
Food. Water. Ammunition. Medicine. Refuge capacity. Defenses. Comms. Sensors. Maps. Names of factions. Names of enemies. Names of dead.
Too much.
Too little time.
I looked at Argent's light. "Find me parts."
"That is imprecise."
"For the mechs. The unfinished projects. Anything on your approved list that gets us field strength without waking a sealed nightmare."
"I will remind you that your definition of sealed nightmare has been historically flexible."
"Use your definition."
"Wise."
"Don't sound so surprised."
"I will try to survive the novelty."
The map shifted. Several markers appeared across the underhive: manufactorum storage vaults, Mechanicus extraction paths, a rail depot, a sealed maintenance archive, and an old industrial chapel converted into a gang armory. Threat levels climbed beside each location in red and amber.
Argent highlighted one cluster near the western transit district. "Primary candidates located. Warden chassis limb assemblies, motive actuators, reactor shielding, and combat-grade servo bundles. Current control: disputed. Mechanicus retrieval interest high. Criminal occupation moderate. Cult infiltration uncertain."
"That sounds like my kind of terrible."
"I expected that response."
Evelyn stepped closer to the projection, eyes narrowing at another marker that had appeared beneath the main map. "What is that one?"
Argent's light paused.
The marker expanded.
A hook-shaped route icon burned red over a lower hab-spur and connected drainage yard. Grainy visuals unfolded beside it: men in red-brown coats, chain hooks, rusted blades, a cage line, a storage yard full of stolen machinery, fuel drums, water filters, ammo boxes, and people packed into fenced sections like inventory.
Evelyn went very still.
I felt the room notice.
"Hook-chain gang," Argent said. "Previous hostile contact. Current location confirmed through stolen vox traffic, Grudge's recovered equipment, and local refugee movement. Resource stockpile significant. Captives present. Leadership intact."
Evelyn's hand closed slowly.
Her body had not been modified. Argent had said that. But something inside her posture sharpened until the tiredness no longer mattered. Her Template System did not show itself to me as a panel, but I saw the effects. Her shoulders aligned. Her feet shifted into a stance that was not from this world. Her eyes tracked exits, cover, elevation, approach routes, and the location of every weapon in the room with crisp tactical hunger.
"You're still recovering," I said.
"Yes," Evelyn replied.
"That was not agreement."
"It was acknowledgment."
I looked at Argent. "Can she go?"
"No," Argent said.
Evelyn smiled.
Argent continued. "Correction: she should not go. She can. The distinction is apparently operationally relevant to reckless people."
"Equip her," I said.
Evelyn's eyes flicked to me.
I held her gaze. "You wanted back in the fight. Fine. Not blind. Not empty-handed. Not alone if comms fail."
"I do not need permission," she said, but the edge in her voice was thinner than usual.
"No," I said. "You need tools."
Argent opened a side alcove.
The Cradle equipped her like it had been waiting for someone dangerous enough to justify the drawer. A fitted underhive combat jacket reinforced with black flexible plating. A repaired Wingman rested in the rack beside it, its frame cleaned, stabilized, and fitted with a Cradle-machined ammunition adapter that looked far too elegant for something designed to put large holes through problems. Below it, locked into a longer cradle bracket, sat the Kraber.
Evelyn went still when she saw it.
Not soft.
Never soft.
But something in her shoulders changed, like a part of her body had been returned before she realized she had been compensating for the absence.
Argent's light hovered beside the weapon rack. "Your existing armaments were damaged, contaminated, and incompatible with several local ammunition standards. I corrected what I could without altering their fundamental handling profiles."
Evelyn lifted the Wingman first. Her thumb moved over the grip, then along the cylinder and sightline with the intimate familiarity of someone checking an old scar. "You touched my gun."
"I repaired your gun."
"You touched my gun."
"I improved its survivability."
"You touched my gun."
I leaned against the wall and folded my arms. "For what it's worth, I think this is her saying thank you."
"It is not," Evelyn said, checking the action.
"It is absolutely not," Argent agreed. "But I have elected to interpret it as such for operational morale."
The Kraber came next. Evelyn pulled it free of the bracket with both hands, and the weapon's mass settled against her like memory snapping into alignment. Her expression sharpened, not into joy exactly, but into readiness. The kind of readiness that made rooms feel smaller.
Alongside the weapons, the alcove offered two spare Wingman reloads, a limited Kraber magazine block, a utility knife with a dark handle and an edge Argent described as "discourteous," compact field tools, and a recall anchor scaled for her hand rather than mine. It was cleaner and lighter than the Grudge monstrosity, with a palm contact lattice and a short-range salvage tagger worked into the wrist brace.
Then the drawer beneath the rack opened with a soft mechanical click.
Small consumables sat inside, arranged with the grim neatness of a surgeon preparing for a knife fight. Two pressure-seal trauma patches. Three coagulant ampoules. A black stim tab marked with a warning rune that looked less like medical advice and more like a legal defense. Two smoke capsules. A compact lumen bead. A spool of cutting filament. Four Cradle-made tag studs for marking salvage too large to move by hand. A disposable chem-filter strip. One palm-sized breaching charge, flat and matte and very clearly not meant for polite doors.
Evelyn picked up the breaching charge.
"No," Argent said immediately.
Evelyn looked at it, then at Argent's light. "You put it in the drawer."
"For emergencies."
"I'm hunting a hook-chain gang through an active underhive warzone."
Argent paused.
I pointed at Evelyn without looking away from the drawer. "That is, unfortunately, a strong opening argument."
"The charge is directional," Argent said, with the exhausted precision of someone already regretting the future. "Do not place it on living tissue. Do not place it on unstable fuel storage. Do not place it on structural supports. Do not allow your sense of humor to participate in deployment."
Evelyn slid the charge into her kit. "Understood."
"She heard 'participate in deployment,'" I said.
"I did," Evelyn replied.
Evelyn picked up the anchor and turned it over. "Resource teleporter?"
"Crude recall anchor," Argent corrected. "Do not use on living targets. Do not retrieve unstable explosives. Do not attempt to recall structural supports. Do not let Grudge teach you operational habits."
"I would never."
"You would."
"I absolutely would," she said, fastening it around her wrist.
I watched the device lock against her. "Captives first. Resources second. Revenge somewhere after not dying."
Evelyn looked at the hook-chain marker.
For a second, the cosmic thing behind her eyes looked through the mortal shell, cold and vast and ancient enough to make the Cradle's sterile air feel thin. Then she blinked, and the local body remained: tired, armed, furious, and smiling with too many plans.
"Those priorities may overlap," she said.
"They always do," I replied. "That's why I said them out loud."
She stepped toward the exit, then stopped beside me. Her gaze flicked once more to my bare chest, because apparently even war could not kill all nonsense.
"Do try to find a shirt before founding a kingdom," Evelyn said.
"No banners," I said.
"No shirts either, apparently."
"Focus."
"I am focused," she said, checking the Wingman before glancing once at the Kraber. "That is the problem."
The new comm bead clicked in my ear.
Argent's voice came through cleanly. "Evelyn route prepared. Numen route prepared. Grudge remains in regeneration bay and is not cleared for redeployment despite multiple attempts to chew through the guarding brace. Caedryn remains in treatment simulation. Cradle repairs ongoing. Resource requirements remain severe."
Something roared deep inside the Cradle.
The sound came through the walls first, not the comm bead. Metal carried it better than air. It rolled along the black ribs of the command gallery, sank through the floor, and came back up through my boots with enough force to make one of the projection markers flicker. It was not pain. I knew Grudge's pain by now. It had a sharper edge, a wounded-gravel shape in the bond.
This was objection.
Evelyn slowly looked toward the far wall.
Argent's light did not move, but somehow managed to look tired. "He heard the word hunt."
Another roar followed, lower this time, thick with teeth, insulted injury, and the clear belief that healing was a negotiable inconvenience.
"He is not going," Argent said.
The comm bead clicked again, and Grudge's regeneration bay feed opened for half a second. I caught a flash of black armor plates submerged under pale fluid, restraint braces locked across too many limbs, tendrils curled around a guarding frame he had apparently decided belonged to him now, and six visible eyes glaring at the nearest diagnostic lens with enough hatred to qualify as an active weapon.
Then the feed cut out.
"Did he just try to intimidate the camera?" Evelyn asked, sounding interested.
"He has been doing so for twenty-one minutes," Argent replied. "The camera remains unconvinced."
A third roar hit the gallery.
This one carried through the bond clean enough to form meaning without words.
Hunt. Mine. Follow. Bite. Now.
I rubbed the bridge of my nose. "You are in a healing tank."
The bond answered with a violent image of the healing tank being outside the category of things that mattered.
"No."
Grudge roared again.
"No," I repeated, louder. "You brought Voss home. You did your job. Now you heal."
The bond shoved back: red hunger, hook-chain scent pulled from Evelyn's marker, enemy-shapes, chase-shapes, the sharp certainty that if Evelyn was hunting something connected to our unfinished business, then Grudge belonged in the teeth of it.
Evelyn's smile sharpened.
"Do not encourage him," Argent said.
"I have not said anything," Evelyn replied.
"You are smiling in a manner that has operational consequences."
"She does that," I said.
Evelyn adjusted the Wingman at her hip and gave the distant regeneration bay a look that somehow managed to be fond, amused, and absolutely willing to weaponize a bad idea later. "Heal first," she called toward the wall, voice carrying across the gallery. "Then we can discuss biting people who deserve it."
Grudge went silent.
For two whole seconds.
Then one heavy, dissatisfied thump echoed through the Cradle as something large struck a restraint brace.
Argent's light dimmed. "He accepts nothing. He is merely postponing argument."
"That's basically acceptance where he's concerned," I said.
"It is not."
"It's close enough for morale."
I looked at the projection one last time. Evelyn's marker split toward the hook-chain gang. Mine moved toward the Warden chassis parts and unfinished Cradle assets. Beneath both, the hidden facility pulsed as salvage became structure, structure became capacity, and capacity became the first fragile edge of power.
Too much to do.
So little time that even thinking about it felt like bleeding.
I flexed my hands, felt the hand cannons waiting, and started toward my own exit.
"Argent," I said.
"Yes?"
"Keep the lights on. And keep Grudge in the tank."
The Cradle's black walls pulsed once, pale and old and hungry.
"I intend to do considerably more than that," Argent replied.
From somewhere deep in the facility, Grudge growled like he had filed an appeal with violence as supporting documentation.
Evelyn smiled at her route.
I smiled at mine.
Then the Cradle opened two doors.