ALEX POV
The corridor swallows us whole.
Metal walls. Emergency lights bleeding red. Sirens screaming like wounded animals. I pull Camila close, my hand locked around her wrist as we run. Every instinct I have is screaming extraction, get her out, get distance, survive, but nothing about this place wants to let us go.
Boots thunder somewhere behind us.
"They're flanking," I mutter, dragging her into a side passage just as gunfire erupts. Bullets chew sparks from the wall we'd been running along seconds earlier.
Camila doesn't scream. She doesn't freeze.
She moves.
That scares me more than the gunfire.
She presses her palm to the wall like she's listening to it breathe. Her eyes flicker, calculating, focused in a way I haven't seen before.
"This way," she says, and pulls me toward a door half-hidden behind a maintenance panel.
"How do you know?" I ask, already moving with her.
"I don't," she answers honestly. "I just… feel it."
We slip inside and I slam the door, jamming a metal rod through the handle. The space beyond is smaller, quieter, an observation room, maybe. One-way glass. Old consoles coated in dust.
Camila stumbles back, breath hitching.
The adrenaline drains from her all at once.
I catch her before she hits the wall.
"Hey," I say, lowering my voice, grounding her with my hands on her shoulders. "Look at me."
Her eyes lift, and I see it.
Memory.
Raw. Flooding.
"I was here," she whispers. "They made me sit there." She points to a chair bolted to the floor. "They asked me questions I didn't understand. They said it was a game."
My jaw tightens.
She swallows. "My mother was screaming. I remember thinking… if I answered wrong, they'd hurt her."
I don't trust myself to speak.
So I pull her into me.
She presses her face into my chest, fists clutching my shirt like she's drowning. I hold her, one hand firm between her shoulder blades, the other cradling the back of her head.
"You're safe now," I murmur, even as the words feel like lies in this place. "I won't let them touch you."
Her breath shakes. "I didn't break."
I close my eyes.
"I know," I say quietly. "You're stronger than all of them."
Her fingers loosen slightly.
For a moment, the sirens fade into the background. The world narrows to the sound of her breathing and the steady thump of my heart beneath her ear.
Then, movement.
A shape flickers behind the glass.
I pull back, gun raised.
A man steps into view on the other side of the window.
Not Solano.
Not a guard.
A technician. Mid-forties. Hands raised. Fear written all over him.
"Please," he says, voice distorted through the thick glass. "I, I didn't know she was here."
Camila stiffens.
I step forward. "Open the door. Slowly."
He fumbles with a keypad. The glass slides aside with a soft hiss.
He looks at Camila like he's seeing a ghost. "You… you were Subject Zero."
Her spine straightens.
"Don't call me that."
He flinches. "They told us you were gone. That the project failed."
Camila's eyes darken. "It didn't fail. It scared them."
The man nods shakily. "Your mother changed it. She rewrote the core architecture. She turned Ophidian into a recursive truth engine. It records corruption… mirrors it back. Exposes everyone connected."
My blood runs cold.
"Where's the master node?" I ask.
The man looks at Camila.
"She is."
Silence crashes down.
Camila exhales slowly. "That's why he can't kill me."
"Yes," the technician whispers. "If you die, the system collapses. Everything encrypted inside you is lost forever."
Boots pound closer.
The man pales. "They're coming."
I grab him by the collar. "How do we get out?"
"There's a coastal exit," he stammers. "Old emergency route. But Solano, "
"I'll deal with him," I snap.
The man types furiously, pulling up a schematic on a dusty monitor. Camila leans in, eyes scanning the screen with frightening ease.
"I remember this," she says. "Left turn after the turbines. There's a lift shaft."
The technician stares at her. "You shouldn't remember that."
She looks up at him. "I shouldn't remember a lot of things."
Gunfire erupts outside the door.
Time's up.
"Go," I order.
We sprint back into the corridor, following Camila's instincts through turns and narrow passages that feel carved into her bones. She doesn't hesitate once.
It terrifies me.
And it makes me proud.
We reach the lift shaft, an open vertical drop, ladders bolted into rusted steel.
"Down," I say. "I'll cover."
She grabs my arm. "No. Together."
I meet her gaze.
She's not asking.
She's choosing.
I nod.
We climb fast, metal cold beneath our palms. Gunfire rings above us, bullets sparking off the shaft walls. I shield her with my body, taking the worst of it, until,
An explosion rocks the facility.
The lights die.
The shaft plunges into darkness.
Camila slips.
I grab her wrist, muscles screaming as her weight jerks me sideways.
"Alex, "
"I've got you," I grunt, hauling her back up inch by inch.
When she's steady again, she looks at me like I just pulled her back from the dead.
Maybe I did.
We reach the bottom and burst out into cold night air.
The ocean roars nearby, wild and endless.
For a moment, we just stand there, breathing, alive, shaking.
Then Camila turns to me.
Her face is different now. Not broken. Not lost.
Awake.
"I know how to end this," she says.
I cup her face, thumb brushing her cheek.
"Then we'll do it your way."
Her hand covers mine.
"No," she says softly. "We'll do it together."
Behind us, the facility trembles, sirens screaming, Solano's empire cracking from the inside.
And for the first time since I met her, I realize something terrifying and beautiful:
She doesn't need me to save her anymore.
She needs me to stand with her.
And I will.
Even if the truth burns us both.