In a ruinous field tent, somewhere on the outer rim of the Angel territories, Marlow sat perfectly still, the comm still warm against his wrist.
He didn't look triumphant. He didn't look afraid.
Just tired. Just older.
He opened a worn, dirt-smudged field notebook, its pages almost crumbling. Dozens of names had been crossed out, some messily, others with precise lines drawn through them.
On the back page, two remained.
Jack Smack.
Selene Marrow.
He tapped his pen once against the page. Then again. No rush.
"They'll burn themselves down," he muttered, almost fondly. "I just have to light the last match."
_______0-0______
The lower lab hummed in darkness.
No music. No words. Just the steady hiss of coolant systems weaving through the floor panels and the faint, metronomic chirp of vital monitors blinking in slow succession, an artificial heartbeat for the dead and the dying.
The overhead lights had long since been turned off. Selene preferred it this way. Fluorescence was a disruption. Artificial light had too much variance, too much heat. In the dark, things obeyed.
Glass canisters lined the walls in patient rows; each filled with preserved tissue or half-grown prototypes suspended in amber fluid. The air smelled faintly of antiseptic and electricity, clean, controlled, oppressive.
Selene moved silently through the dim space, her footsteps inaudible beneath the floor's insulated mesh. She didn't need to see clearly. She remembered every step. Every station. Every failure.
No need for assistants.
No need for sound.
Everything was calibrated to her rhythm, machines tuned to her respiration, terminals that logged her heartbeat without needing biometric prompts. Even the atmosphere was slightly thinned, oxygen levels lower than standard to preserve the cold sterility of the chamber.
She paused before Table Nine.
The subject that was restrained there wasn't moving. Not yet. But the numbers on the monitor suggested a flicker of change.
She adjusted a nearby dial without looking.
The shadows deepened. The hum of the lab held steady, unfeeling, unblinking, eternal.
Selene didn't blink either.
Selene Marrow didn't blink as she adjusted the straps on the newest subject's spine, her gloved hands moving with the quiet grace of repetition. A data tablet floated nearby, hovering silently beside her elbow, the holographic readouts updating in real time.
Subject Nine twitched once. She noted it without emotion.
The sedative had worn off faster than expected. Adaptation. Promising.
Selene leaned closer, her voice just above a breath. "Pain is merely the body remembering what it once feared."
There was no reply, of course. None required.
Across the room, a small red light blinked once, then went dark. A camera, formerly part of Jack's surveillance grid. Offline. Not because of failure, but because she had allowed it.
Hours ago, she'd severed his access with surgical precision that left no trace, no error logs. Just a dead feed in his war room, buried beneath a dozen fabricated firewalls and false diagnostics. He wouldn't even know it was missing until it no longer mattered.
She'd been watching him instead.
From a shadow channel buried two tiers deeper than his highest clearance, Selene observed everything. His footsteps through the upper command corridor.
His rising cortisol levels as each alert stacked upon the last. The way his pupils dilated when Gene's name appeared in the redacted logs. He thought he was the architect of order, the guardian of legacy.
But Jack was a child playing general.
And she was still watching.
Her eyes didn't blink. They simply tracked the fading pulses of light across the now-disconnected surveillance stream. Data whispered through her private neural uplink, biosigns, surveillance shadows, behavioral fluctuations.
All of it streamed past her awareness, not like information, but like instinct. She already knew how Jack would react. The anger. The pride. The purge.
Selene raised one gloved hand and tapped the reinforced glass beside her, not as a signal but as punctuation. A declaration to no one but the dark.
"Let the boy spiral," she said, softly, clinically. "He thinks it's a coup. But it's just the next trial."
Behind her, something shifted.
A second chamber blinked awake, vat sealed, humming low and alive with internal resonance. Amber light oozed through the dense fog of embryonic fluid.
Inside, something floated. Unformed, but not inert. A curled shape, twitching faintly, twitching as if it heard her voice in the thick electric dark.
Selene didn't smile.
She didn't need to.
The experiment was unfolding precisely on schedule. Every betrayal, every death, every declaration of war, all accounted for. All data points. All variables.
The garden was never meant to grow.
Only to burn, and be measured.
Back in the war room, Jack stood alone.
The emergency lights pulsed low and red, casting long, jagged shadows across the sterile floor. They flickered like warning veins beneath skin, artificial, overworked, close to rupture. The kind of atmosphere that made men think they still had control, right before they lost it.
A hiss broke the silence. Not loud, but sharp, followed by the soft mechanical click of a hidden drawer releasing. The panel near his right hand slid open, seamless and slow, as if responding to muscle memory no one else could trigger.
Inside: a weathered badge, rimmed in scorched chrome and cracked resin.
DIRECTOR J. SMACK.
A title that hadn't existed on record in years. A position quietly dissolved, replaced, overwritten, just like him. The world had moved on, and Selene had moved faster.
He picked it up anyway.
His thumb brushed the black-and-white photo. His face stared back, clear-eyed, sharp, not yet carved by disappointment or consumed by betrayal. A ghost of a man who once believed he was in control.
Across the room, one of the surveillance monitors cycled automatically.
The screen froze on a still image, Selene in the lower lab, bathed in soft blue light. Her posture was identical to the day he first saw her. Not older. Not younger. Just the same. Like time was something she had outgrown.
"You think you made me?" Jack muttered, almost laughing. "But I've always been better than you."
The badge hit the desk with a dull clack. An afterthought.
He turned to the old terminal embedded in the wall, one so deeply buried in the command structure that most of his current agents didn't know it existed. The interface hummed to life, skeletal and unstable, running on protocols from a time before Selene formalized oversight.
He didn't hesitate.
Fingers flew across the console, bypassing warnings, override requests, and identity checks. Back-channel pings scattered like shrapnel through the room, each one sent to a dead node, a cold inbox, a forgotten name.
Old codes.
Long-dead handshake phrases.
Each command was short, surgical.
"Asset Theta: reawaken."
"Target: Cinderfall variant confirmed."
"Mission Priority: Erase loyalty."
"Burn the garden from the roots."
This wasn't retaliation. It was desperation dressed as rebellion. A scavenger king rallying ghosts from the graveyard, calling on the splinters Selene hadn't managed to sterilize when she institutionalized their empire.
He was summoning the old guard. The loyal. The bitter. The reckless.
At the center of the war room, a holotable activated with a low pulse, casting stark blue light across his clenched jaw.
The full White Angels network unfolded before him: cities, labs, bloodlines, personnel ranks, and buried assets. She had built it all. But not alone.
He leaned forward.
Typed in four words.
BURN THE GARDEN DOWN.
The lights snapped off.
The screen went red.
[PURGE PROTOCOL — ENGAGED]