Chapter 857: A step back

Three days after the attack on the Eastern Cardinal, the scale of it had finally settled into something concrete enough to actually work with.

The debriefing room’s main wall no longer showed live feeds of fire and evacuation. It showed numbers instead, cold and final in a way that felt somehow worse than the chaos had. Five academies destroyed. Six hundred and forty-one confirmed dead, a figure that had climbed steadily over three days and only that morning finally stopped moving. Two thousand three hundred injured, spread across every hospital in the Cardinal and several beyond it. Students who’d lost their abilities entirely, sitting in recovery wards with nothing left of what had made them who they were three days ago.

Sophie stood at the head of the table, arms crossed, staring at the numbers like she could will them smaller through sheer refusal to look away.

"That’s the confirmed total," Sam said, standing near the console, voice carefully flat in the way people got when reciting numbers too large to feel properly. "Regional command doesn’t expect it to climb much further, but they haven’t ruled it out entirely."

"Six hundred and forty-one," Diana said quietly, like saying it out loud might make it settle differently. "Children."

"Some adults," Brooks said. "Instructors. A handful of visiting parents who’d been on-site for scheduled events." Her jaw tightened. "Most of it was children."

Angel sat at the far end of the table, still in the same worn field jacket she’d been wearing off and on for three days straight, dark circles under her eyes that made her look older than she had a week ago.

"The public reaction is worse than the numbers," she said.

"Define worse," Sophie said.

"Trending online right now, in order of volume." Angel pulled up her own tablet, scrolling through a feed that clearly hadn’t stopped moving in days. "Hashtags calling for the EDF’s entire command structure to resign. A counter-movement calling for Eclipse to be stripped of its independent operating status and folded directly under military oversight, permanently, no more autonomy. A third faction, smaller but loud, saying both organizations are equally useless and humanity should be arming civilians directly instead of trusting institutions that keep failing to stop this."

"Are they wrong," Kelvin said quietly, from where he sat near his own terminal, not looking up.

"Doesn’t matter if they’re wrong," Angel said. "It matters that they’re loud, and getting louder, and every hour this drags on without a visible response, the narrative hardens further."

"There are protests," Sam added. "Three cities so far. Outside EDF regional offices, outside two of our own outposts. Peaceful, mostly, but growing. Signs asking why the strongest people in the Cardinal couldn’t stop six coordinated strikes when they’ve stopped worse before."

"They don’t understand what actually happened," Sera said.

"They don’t need to understand it," Brooks said, voice hard. "They need results. That’s how public opinion works during a crisis. Nobody’s interested in the nuance of a diversion tactic three days after the funerals start."

Sophie exhaled slowly, pressing both hands flat against the table.

"Fine," she said. "Then we give them results. What’s our actual response capability right now."

"That’s the other piece of this," Angel said, setting her tablet down. "The Ark reached out yesterday. Formally. They’re putting my task force in direct operational command of the Purge response across the Eastern Cardinal, effective immediately."

"Your task force," Diana said. "Not Eclipse."

"Not exclusively," Angel said. "That’s the part that matters. The Supreme General personally overrode two members of his own command staff who wanted this handled purely through official channels, no faction involvement at all. He specifically requested this be structured as a joint task force. Eclipse and my people working together, formally, on record, for the first time since any of this started."

The room went quiet at that.

"He’s putting political capital behind that," Brooks said slowly. "After everything. After the tribunal, after years of institutional distance, he’s the one pushing to formalize cooperation with us. Publicly. During the worst PR crisis EDF’s had in years."

"Which makes what we know about Hendricks and the First Lady even more of a landmine," Sophie said, something bitter in her voice. "The one person in that entire command structure actually extending us real trust right now is the one person we can’t safely warn about what might be sitting in his own house."

"We’re not touching that yet," Brooks said, firm. "Not now. Not with everything else on fire."

"I know." Sophie rubbed at her temple. "Doesn’t make it easier to sit on."

"Focus," Angel said. "The joint task force. Structure’s still being finalized, but broadly, my people handle ground coordination and public-facing response, since we already have EDF authorization and legitimacy in the eyes of the government. Eclipse handles targeted operations, anything requiring capabilities my task force doesn’t have on hand. Intelligence gets shared both directions, no more working blind on either side."

"When does this actually start moving," Diana asked.

"Now," Angel said. "Today. The General wants visible action within seventy-two hours of the attack, and we’re already at hour seventy-one."

"Visible how," Sera asked.

"A confirmed strike," Angel said. "Something the public can actually see and understand. Not a press conference. Not a statement. A result. Something that says clearly, we know who did this, and we’re already answering it."

"Do we know who did this," Kelvin said. "Specifically enough to hit back with precision instead of just hitting something and calling it justice."

"We know it traces back to the Rowes," Sophie said. "Lila’s parents. We know they’ve been operating out of at least one off-world facility, the one she was taken to weeks ago. If we can locate that facility, we have a real target. Not symbolic. Actual."

"That’s where Kelvin and Lila come in," Brooks said.

Every head turned toward the two of them.

Kelvin didn’t look up immediately, still visibly working through some private tension from three days earlier that hadn’t fully resolved.

"We’re going to try," he said finally. "No promises. She was taken there with blacked-out windows, no visual reference, and whatever they used to keep her disoriented was thorough. But there might be something in there we can use even if she doesn’t consciously remember it."

"How," Sophie asked.

"I have something," Kelvin said. "Been sitting on it a while, actually, never had a real use case for it until now." He finally looked up, something careful in his expression. "It’s not mind reading. I want to be clear about that upfront, because I know how it’s going to sound. It’s closer to a lie detector, if a lie detector could also sketch. It reads involuntary neural response patterns during recall, cross-references them against sensory memory fragments the conscious mind never properly processed, and builds a composite. Sound, pressure, even smell sometimes, translated into something visual enough to actually work with."

"You built that," Diana said, something like pride cutting briefly through the room’s heaviness.

"Built it a year ago. Different reason entirely." Kelvin didn’t elaborate further, and nobody pushed. "Point is, it exists, and if there’s anything usable buried in what Lila experienced during that flight, this gives us the best shot at pulling it out."

"When do we start," Lila asked, voice quieter than usual, still carrying the rawness of three days ago.

"Now," Kelvin said. "No reason to wait."

---

The lab Kelvin worked from felt smaller than usual with just the two of them in it, the wider strategy meeting still audible faintly through the walls, voices rising and falling in the debriefing room down the hall.

Lila sat in a reclined chair, a series of thin sensors already placed carefully along her temples and the base of her skull, and Kelvin worked in silence for a while, calibrating something on his main terminal, avoiding her eyes more than the technical work strictly required.

"You can say it," Lila said eventually.

"Say what."

"Whatever you’re not saying right now."

Kelvin’s hands stilled on the console.

"I’m angry at you," he said finally, quiet, not looking at her. "I want to be clear about that. What you did, what it cost, I haven’t fully processed how angry I actually am yet, and I don’t think three days is enough time to get there."

"Okay."

"But I still trust you enough to be in this room with sensors on your skull," he continued. "Both things are true at once. I don’t know how to make that make more sense than it already does."

Lila’s throat worked. "That’s more than I probably deserve right now."

"Probably," Kelvin agreed, and something in his tone made it almost gentle despite the word. "Let’s just do the work. We can be complicated about everything else later."

He returned to the console, fingers moving fast, eyes flickering faint green as the interface synced with his own ability.

"Close your eyes," he said. "Don’t try to remember on purpose. That actually makes this harder, forces the conscious mind to reconstruct things instead of just retrieving them. Just let your mind go back there, and let the machine do the actual pulling."

Lila closed her eyes.

"Start from when they took you off the warehouse floor," Kelvin said, voice steady, professional now, all business. "Walk me through it as it comes, even if it feels disconnected."

"There was a transport," Lila said slowly, eyes still closed. "Windows blacked out completely, like you already know. But I remember the sound. Engine pitch was different from anything EDF standard. Higher, almost musical, like it was running some kind of harmonic drive instead of conventional thrust."

On the screen beside Kelvin, a rough waveform began rendering itself, translating the description into something closer to data.

"Good," Kelvin murmured. "Keep going."

"Flight felt long. Hours, easily, maybe more, hard to track time in there." Lila’s brow furrowed slightly, still deep in the recall. "There was a moment, near the end, where gravity shifted. Not turbulence. A real, distinct shift, like we crossed something. A boundary of some kind."

"A gravitational transition," Kelvin said, already typing notes fast. "Could mean we crossed into a different system’s dominant gravity well. That’s useful, that actually narrows a search radius considerably."

"When we landed," Lila continued, "before they walked me anywhere, there was a smell. Sharp. Metallic, but also something underneath it, almost sweet. I didn’t recognize it at the time."

The screen beside Kelvin flickered, an image slowly resolving out of noise, faint and imperfect but unmistakably present. A hazy impression of red-orange sky, visible for just a fraction of a second through what must have been a gap in her blindfold or a moment of the sedation wearing thin.

Kelvin stared at it.

"That’s real," he said, something like genuine excitement cutting through his earlier careful distance. "That’s an actual visual fragment, buried under all the disorientation. Your conscious mind never registered it properly, but your eyes still caught it."

"What does it mean," Lila asked, eyes still closed.

"It means we might actually have something to work with." Kelvin was already cross-referencing, pulling up star charts, atmospheric composition databases, anything that might match a red-orange sky signature against known and suspected Purge-adjacent systems. "Keep going. Anything else. Sounds when you actually arrived, anything underfoot, anything at all."

"Gravel," Lila said. "Under my feet, when they walked me somewhere. And there was a hum. Low, constant, like machinery running somewhere close but not directly beside me."

"A facility with active industrial output," Kelvin said, working fast now. "That fits mining operation, matches what we already suspected."

The image on screen sharpened slightly further, the red-orange sky joined now by the faint suggestion of jagged terrain along the horizon, mountains or ridgelines, hard to tell which.

"This is good," Kelvin said, something like real hope in his voice for the first time in days. "This is genuinely good, Lila. Keep your eyes closed a little longer. I think we’re close to something usable."