The thought of returning to her clan was a cold knot in Kiera's stomach.
The Azure Dragon stronghold in the Core Sector was her home, but The Quartermaster's words had poisoned the well.
She now saw potential traitors in every memory of her former comrades.
The council members who had praised her, the guards she had trained with, the friends she had bled with—any one of them could be a Vanguard agent, or worse, a party to her brother's murder.
"We can't just walk up to the front gate," she said, her voice tight.
"The council has forbidden me from investigating Ronan's death. Returning now, with... him," she gestured to Ryu, "would be seen as a direct act of defiance. They would detain me, and they would dissect him."
"Then we don't go to the council," Joric reasoned. "You must have someone you can trust. A single ally. Someone outside the political inner circle."
Kiera's mind raced.
Trust. It was a word that now tasted like ash.
But there was one person. His name was Jin.
He was the clan's foremost cryptographer, a quiet, unassuming man who had been a close friend of her brother, Ronan.
Jin was a technician, not a warrior or a politician.
He operated in the deep vaults of the clan's archives, a world away from the council chambers and the training grounds.
And he had been devastated by Ronan's death.
"There's someone," Kiera admitted.
"Jin. He's our best cryptographer. If anyone can crack that slate, it's him. And he was loyal to my brother."
Making contact was the challenge.
Any official communication would be monitored. She had to use a method that was off the books, a ghost channel from her past as an elite operative.
She found a quiet corner and began assembling a strange, archaic-looking device from parts in Joric's kit.
It was a burst-transmission laser-comm, a directional, line-of-sight communication tool that was impossible to intercept unless you were directly in its path.
She aimed the device at a specific skyscraper in the glittering Core Sector, a communications relay she knew Jin had access to.
She sent a single, simple message, encoded in a cipher that only she and her brother had ever used.
The message was three words: 'The Serpent BITES.' It was a distress code they had invented as children, a call for an urgent, secret meeting.
Now, they had to wait.
If Jin was still loyal, he would respond. If he had been turned, or was being watched, then her message would be a death warrant, confirming her location to her enemies within her own clan.
Hours crawled by.
The tension in the small apartment was suffocating. Every sound from the street outside, every creak of the old building, sent a jolt of paranoia through them.
Finally, a small, unassuming cleaning drone zipped past their window. It paused for a fraction of a second, and a tiny beam of light projected a message onto the grimy wall of the room.
It was a sequence of numbers. Not a message, but a time and a location.
A maintenance tunnel that ran beneath the clan stronghold. Jin had responded.
He was willing to meet.
"We have our way in," Kiera said, a sliver of hope cutting through her despair.
"But we are walking into the heart of the dragon's den. From this point forward, we trust no one. Not the guards. Not the council. No one but Jin."
She looked at Ryu.
"Your control has improved. But are you ready for this? The Core Sector is saturated with the energy of thousands of high-clan warriors. For your senses, it will be like trying to hear a whisper in a hurricane. You will be our lookout, but you will be half-blind."
"I'm ready," Ryu said, his voice firm.
He had come too far to turn back now. He was no longer a victim.
He was a player in the game, and he was about to make his next move on the board.