CHAPTER 16
There are moments when the mind protects itself by pretending it does not understand.
Kade knew this because he was living inside one.
Elias's words still hung in the air between them — You didn't break into prison to save me — and Kade's body had responded before his mind could argue. Muscles tightening. Breath slowing. The old internal switch flipping from brother to architect.
He hated himself for how automatic it was.
The forest felt wrong now.
Not dangerous — exposed.
That was worse.
They had been moving for hours without direction, and only now did Kade realize how carefully that lack of direction had been curated. The paths they took were not random. They were suggested. Clearings appeared where they needed rest. Signal dead zones formed just long enough to let them breathe.
Someone was shaping the silence.
Elias noticed it too.
"You're walking like this is familiar," Elias said quietly.
Kade stopped.
Everyone did.
He turned slowly, his face unreadable, and Elias felt something shift — the subtle terror of realizing that the person you love most has been carrying weight you never saw.
"This part," Elias said, voice tight, "you didn't tell me about."
Kade nodded once.
"No," he agreed. "I didn't."
Sera crossed her arms, anger and fear braided together. "Then start."
Kade didn't speak immediately. He crouched, picked up a small stone, rolled it between his fingers like a habit he'd forgotten he had.
"When I was nine," he said, "our mother taught me how to disappear."
Elias blinked. "What?"
Kade smiled faintly — not warmly.
"She said it wasn't about hiding your body," he continued. "It was about hiding your intent."
The stone slipped from his fingers.
"She said the best liars don't lie. They tell the truth at the wrong time."
Dorian went very still.
"That's not a normal thing for a mother to teach a child," Sera said.
"No," Kade replied. "It isn't."
The memory came back fully now — not as an image, but as a sequence, because that was how his mind catalogued pain.
A kitchen table.
A chipped mug.
Rain against the windows.
His mother's voice calm, patient, engaged.
People think intelligence is speed, she'd said. It's not. It's control.
She'd given him puzzles disguised as games. Pattern recognition exercises hidden inside bedtime stories. Logic traps embedded in casual conversation.
Why do you think he answered that way?
What would you have done differently?
What question wasn't asked?
He had thought it was love.
Now he understood it was training.
Elias shook his head. "You're saying she— what? Groomed you?"
Kade looked up.
"No," he said. "She prepared me."
"For what?" Elias demanded.
Kade hesitated.
That hesitation was real.
"For something she hoped would never come," he said.
Sera scoffed. "That's convenient."
"It's also true," Kade replied. "She wasn't proud of it. That's the part everyone misses."
Dorian spoke quietly. "People who do terrible things rarely enjoy them."
Kade nodded.
"She didn't choose the system," Kade said. "The system chose her."
Elias's face drained of color. "You're saying she worked for them."
"Yes."
"And you didn't think that was worth mentioning?"
Kade stood.
"I didn't know until Blackridge," he said. "Not for sure."
Elias laughed — broken, sharp. "Oh, so that makes it better."
"No," Kade said. "It makes it worse."
They reached an abandoned farmhouse just before nightfall.
The windows were gone. The roof half-collapsed. But it was defensible — narrow approaches, solid sightlines, no obvious surveillance.
Kade chose it instantly.
Which meant it had been chosen for him long ago.
They barricaded doors, set watch rotations without speaking, fell into roles too easily for comfort.
That was when Elias finally exploded.
"You planned for this," Elias said, pacing the ruined living room. "Not details — outcomes. You always do."
Kade sat on the floor, back against a wall, eyes closed.
"Yes."
"So say it," Elias demanded. "Say you knew I'd be used as leverage."
Kade opened his eyes.
"I didn't know," he said. "I suspected."
"That's not better!"
"No," Kade agreed. "It's survivable."
Silence crashed down hard.
Sera watched them, heart aching despite herself. This wasn't betrayal in the dramatic sense. This was the quieter, crueler kind — the kind where love and manipulation had grown in the same soil.
Dorian broke it.
"There's something else," he said.
Everyone looked at him.
"When the voice spoke earlier," Dorian continued, "it wasn't confirming data. It was testing reactions."
Kade's gaze sharpened. "Explain."
"They already knew you'd escape," Dorian said. "They knew you'd adapt. What they didn't know was whether you'd turn back."
Elias frowned. "Turn back where?"
"To us," Dorian replied.
The room shifted.
Sera whispered, "They weren't recruiting you."
Kade's stomach tightened.
"They were recruiting the group," he said.
Dorian nodded. "A system doesn't want one weapon. It wants redundancy."
The truth landed heavy and cold.
Elias sat down hard.
"So what," he said bitterly, "we're assets now?"
Kade stared at the cracked ceiling.
"No," he said. "We're leverage."
The message came just after midnight.
Not through the shard.
Through the radio.
An old battery-powered unit they hadn't checked because it looked too broken to matter.
It crackled to life on its own.
A woman's voice filled the room.
Older.
Steadier.
Familiar in a way that made Kade's breath catch.
"Kade," the voice said. "You always did like abandoned places."
The world stopped.
Elias stood slowly.
"No," he whispered. "No fucking way."
Kade didn't move.
His voice, when it came, was tight.
"Hello, Mom."
Sera felt the word like a slap.
The voice softened. "I hoped you wouldn't hear me like this."
Elias lunged toward the radio. "You're dead."
A sigh. Sad. Real.
"I was never good at staying that way," their mother said.
Kade's hands curled into fists.
"You let them take Elias," he said quietly.
"I didn't let anything," she replied. "I warned you."
"No," Kade snapped. "You trained me."
"Yes," she said. "So you wouldn't break when they came."
"They framed my brother."
"They selected him," she corrected. "Because they knew you'd follow."
Elias's voice cracked. "You let me rot in a cage."
A pause.
Then: "I hated every minute of it."
"That doesn't absolve you," Sera said coldly.
"I know," the woman replied. "I didn't ask to be forgiven."
Kade closed his eyes.
"What do you want?" he asked.
The radio hummed.
"To end it," his mother said. "Before it ends you."
Dorian's jaw tightened. "You're still inside the system."
"Yes," she said. "And it's fracturing."
Kade opened his eyes.
"How bad?"
Her answer was immediate.
"They're accelerating Phase Two."
Silence.
Elias laughed hollowly. "Of course they are."
"They believe fear sharpens intelligence," she continued. "They're wrong. It narrows it."
Kade leaned forward. "Then why stay?"
"Because someone has to mislabel the data," she said. "Someone has to lie."
Kade smiled — sad, proud, furious all at once.
"You taught me well," he said.
"I taught you too well," she replied. "That's why they're afraid of you."
"Then why keep pushing?" Elias demanded.
Another pause.
Longer this time.
"Because," his mother said quietly, "they think you're already theirs."
The radio clicked off.
No static.
No farewell.
Just absence.
No one spoke for a long time.
Finally, Elias stood.
"So," he said, voice steady in a way that scared Sera, "what's the plan?"
Kade looked up at his brother.
This time, there was no hesitation.
"We burn the filter," Kade said.
Dorian exhaled sharply. "That'll collapse everything."
"Yes."
"And kill a lot of systems," Sera added.
"Yes."
Elias nodded. "Good."
Kade stood.
"For the first time," he said, "we don't play their game."
He looked at each of them.
"We become unpredictable."
The farmhouse creaked as the wind shifted.
Somewhere far away, systems recalculated.
They did not see this coming.
And that — finally — was the point.