Rourke moved like a man who'd already written off his own survival odds.
Aaron caught it in the peripheral—the big man's shoulder dropping, weight transferring to his lead foot, the specific geometry of someone who'd stopped calculating escape routes. Rourke came out of cover at a dead sprint, not at an angle, not with any tactical misdirection. Straight at the Hunter. A human missile with no guidance system except get there.
The Hunter's head rotated toward the new threat. Smooth. Mechanical. Like a security camera tracking motion.
Don't, Aaron thought, and didn't say it, because there wasn't time and it wouldn't have mattered.
Rourke hit the Hunter at the hip, both arms wrapping around the armored torso in a bear hug that would have taken a normal man off his feet. The Hunter didn't go off its feet. It staggered one step—one—the hydraulic hiss of servos compensating, boots leaving scorch-dark skids on the concrete floor. But Rourke held. Tendons standing out in his neck like bridge cables, face going purple with exertion, he held.
Kael was already moving.
Aaron watched him come out of the server stack shadows at a low run, one hand digging into the satchel at his side. The charge was a flat disc, matte black, the kind of thing that looked boring and bureaucratic right up until it wasn't. Kael slapped it against the Hunter's upper back with a sound like a cabinet door shutting, fingers working the arming sequence in under two seconds.
He didn't look at Aaron. He looked at Rourke.
Something passed between them—the specific, compressed communication of people who'd been in bad rooms together before. Rourke's eyes said go. Kael's jaw said yeah.
Kael ran.
The detonation wasn't loud so much as physical. The pressure wave hit Aaron in the sternum before the sound registered, shoved him back a half-step, and then the noise arrived—a flat, concussive crack that bounced off every hard surface in the server room and came back as a wall of overlapping echoes. The overhead lighting strobed, three of the fluorescent panels blowing out entirely. The smell hit immediately after: scorched polymer, ozone, the acrid sweetness of melted circuit insulation.
The Hunter walked out of the smoke.
Its left pauldron was gone, the armor beneath it bubbled and blackened, one section of the chest plate cracked in a spiderweb pattern that exposed something dark and structural underneath. The optical sensors on its faceplate flickered, one of them strobing at irregular intervals. It was damaged. Meaningfully damaged.
It was also still standing.
Rourke was not.
The blast had taken him off the Hunter's body and turned him into a projectile. He hit the concrete wall ten feet away with a sound Aaron felt in his back teeth, and he didn't bounce. He folded. Slid down the wall and came to rest in a seated slump, head forward, arms loose at his sides. The wall behind him had a new crack in it, a jagged split running from floor to mid-height, and Aaron made himself look at Rourke's chest until he saw it move. Once. Shallow. But it moved.
Alive. Unconscious. Not your problem for the next sixty seconds.
Kael didn't see it that way.
He was screaming something that might have been words and might have been pure frequency, his rifle up, firing in controlled bursts that sparked off the Hunter's remaining armor and accomplished nothing except making noise and spending ammunition. Each shot hit. Every single one hit. The man could shoot. It just didn't matter, and Aaron could see in the set of Kael's shoulders—the way they'd locked up, the way his movement had gone from tactical to mechanical—that some part of him already knew that and was choosing to keep pulling the trigger anyway.
Aaron's gaze moved from Rourke's still form to the transfer module sitting in his vest pocket to the mainframe's primary node on the far wall, where the indicator lights pulsed in their slow, indifferent sequence. His palm was still bleeding, the old cut weeping steadily, and he pressed it flat against the side of his leg to keep the blood off the Null Phone's screen.
The room. We move the room.
The Hunter shrugged.
It was almost casual—a roll of those massive, scorched shoulders, a slight forward lean as if adjusting to a new center of gravity. The cracked chest plate shifted, settled. The strobing optical sensor steadied. It stood in the dissipating smoke of its own near-destruction and oriented itself with the unhurried precision of something that didn't experience setbacks, only delays.
Its faceplate turned.
The one functioning sensor locked onto Aaron with a quality of attention that was, somehow, worse than anger.
The smoke from Kael's rifle hadn't finished curling toward the ventilation grates before Aaron made the decision.
Not a dramatic one. Not the kind that came with swelling music and a slow turn toward the camera. It arrived the way most of his better ideas did—as a cold, flat assessment that the current approach was producing exactly zero results, and that continuing it was the operational definition of stupidity.
The Hunter stood in the wreckage of its own detonation. Scorch marks ran up its left flank like a bad rash, and one of its pauldrons had cracked along the seam, exposing a lattice of sub-dermal plating underneath. Rourke's sacrifice had bought them a dent. A dent.
Kael was still firing. Each shot sparked off the Hunter's torso and ricocheted into server stacks with a sound like someone flicking a very expensive lightbulb.
Stop, Aaron thought at him, though he didn't bother saying it out loud. Kael wouldn't hear him over the gunfire, and more importantly, the Hunter wasn't even tracking Kael anymore. Its one functional optical sensor—a flat, amber disc where the left eye had been before the explosion took the other one—was pointed directly at Aaron.
It had been, for the last forty seconds.
Aaron stood very still and let it look.
He had the Null Phone in his hand, the cracked screen showing nothing to any external observer. To him, the pre-loaded sequence sat in a nested subroutine he'd spent three days architecting, a set of cascading permission errors that would, in theory, convince the local area of reality that it had been assigned to a different spatial coordinate. The Phase Glitch. He'd never tested it at scale. He'd barely tested it at any scale.
Now was apparently the scale.
"Lara!" His voice cut through Kael's gunfire, sharp and flat. No room for misinterpretation. "Hook the generator to the primary node. Now."
Across the room, Lara was already moving—he'd watched her read the situation approximately four seconds before he'd said anything, which was one of the things that made her worth keeping alive. She grabbed the portable generator's transfer cable with both hands, dragging it across the floor toward the mainframe's primary interface panel. The cable caught on a chunk of blown server casing. She kicked it free without breaking stride.
"What are you doing?" Kael shouted, not stopping firing.
"Moving the battlefield." Aaron's fingers were already working the Null Phone's dead screen, tracing the activation gesture through the haptic layer that didn't officially exist. "We can't kill it in this room. So we're leaving this room."
"We're inside a building—"
"Kael." He kept his voice level. "Reload and get clear of the primary node. You have about fifteen seconds."
The Hunter took three steps toward him.
Aaron didn't move back. He watched it come, cataloguing the new asymmetry in its gait—right leg compensating for something the explosion had done to the left hip actuator, a barely perceptible hitch every other stride. It's degrading. Not fast enough to matter in a straight fight, but enough to matter in a different kind of fight.
The kind where you didn't need it to be dead. You just needed it to be somewhere else.
Behind him, he heard Lara slam the transfer cable into the primary node's port. The mainframe made a sound like a substation deciding whether to have a heart attack—a deep, resonant hum that climbed in frequency until it was less a sound than a pressure behind the molars.
The overhead lights flickered.
Then the air changed.
It was subtle at first. The server stacks nearest the mainframe seemed to develop a slight optical inconsistency, their edges going soft and prismatic, like heat shimmer on asphalt but perpendicular to the floor. The temperature in the room dropped two degrees in a second—Aaron felt it across the back of his hand, the bleeding cut from his palm going from a dull throb to a sharp, cold sting.
The Hunter stopped.
Its head tilted left. Then right. The amber sensor swept the room, and for the first time since it had entered, its attention fractured—not toward Kael, not toward Lara, but toward the cascading error bloom that Aaron's sequence was generating in every direction simultaneously. A system anomaly the size of a small building, radiating outward from the mainframe like a scream in a language the Hunter was constitutionally obligated to hear.
Aaron watched it process.
He watched it fail to process.
The light in the room bent. Not metaphorically—physically bent, the fluorescent strips above warping their output around something that wasn't quite there yet, something that the local geometry was beginning to accommodate with extreme reluctance. The edges of the server stacks shimmered like a photograph held over a flame.
The room had begun to tear.