People said the deeper you went into Twelve‑North, the colder the air became.
That wasn't true.
The air stayed carefully regulated, kept at a neutral temperature that would not distract anyone. But in the elevator cage carrying them down toward ring three, Kael felt the warmth leave his skin centimeter by centimeter.
"Breathe," Aiden murmured.
Kael obeyed, eyes fixed on the glowing numbers as they scrolled past.
LEVEL 2.
LEVEL 2B.
LEVEL 3 – LABS.
The dead collar shell Taro had gutted for him still hung loosely around his throat. It weighed almost nothing, but every vibration of the cabin made it slide against his skin, a metallic reminder of what a real one had been here.
Lysa stood in front of the doors, straight‑backed, hands clasped behind her like she was overseeing a routine inspection.
Their cover, for now, held.
Taro, still up on the diagnostics level, had launched the loop into the internal network. As long as no one asked the wrong questions at the wrong time, the cameras saw what they were told to see: two agents and a collared, docile Deviant on their way to "experimental transfer."
"Once we hit ring three," Aiden murmured, "we're in the dark. The schematics I've seen stop at the sorting platforms. The rest is Board‑eyes only."
"Good thing we brought imagination, then," Lysa replied without turning.
A faint jolt.
The doors slid open onto a narrower, darker corridor.
Here, the light came from blue‑white strips set into the ceiling, pulsing in time with the shields. The walls were no longer smooth and white, but a matte gray veined with conduits.
Kael felt his shoulders tighten.
"You okay?" Aiden asked under his breath.
"Yes," Kael lied. "No. Keep talking, it helps."
"Cover sheet," Aiden went on, as if running through a briefing. "Agent Lioren escorting subject E‑73, special authorization for transfer to test unit. Lysa is supervising officer. We walk like everything is normal."
"Normal," Kael echoed with a low laugh. "There's nothing normal about this place."
A checkpoint waited for them twenty meters ahead.
Two guards.
A console.
A scan pad.
Lysa lengthened her stride, posture all authority.
"Transfer unit," she snapped. "Priority omega lab."
The guard on the left barely raised an eyebrow.
"Mission order?" he asked.
Aiden held out an electronic armband. Its surface gleamed with an official seal, forged from old patterns he had stolen piece by piece before leaving the Order.
The guard scanned it, waited.
The device clicked, then flashed green.
"Subject on the pad," the second guard said, nodding at Kael.
Kael's heart stumbled.
He glanced at Aiden.
"It's in the plan," Aiden murmured. "They're just checking the collar response. Stay calm, let the loop do the work."
"And if it fails?"
"Then we improvise."
Kael hated how true that sounded.
He stepped onto the pad with one foot, then the other.
A cold light swept him from head to toe.
For a single heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the empty collar shell vibrated, as if remembering how to be alive.
A tingling ran across Kael's skin and up the back of his neck.
Numbers streamed over the control screen.
"Signature confirmed," the console announced. "Deviant E‑73, status: contained."
Kael only realized he'd been holding his breath when his lungs began to burn.
He dragged in air sharply.
The guard nodded, almost bored.
"You're clear," he said. "Internal lifts are at the end of the corridor."
Lysa gave him a clipped gesture that could pass for a salute.
They moved on.
"Taro deserves a cake," Kael muttered through his teeth.
"If he lives long enough to eat it," Aiden replied.
***
At the end of the corridor, the internal lifts looked more like armored capsules than cabins.
Lysa selected a destination on the panel.
No floor number, just a code: R3‑Ω.
"You're aiming high," Aiden whispered.
"If we want proof, that's where it lives," Lysa said. "Observation labs on the edges only keep the crumbs. The core is the omega block."
They stepped inside.
The capsule shut around them with the sound of a vault closing.
This time, the descent was shorter, but heavier. Kael felt the pressure, not in his ears but in his chest.
When the doors opened, the smell changed.
No more simple antiseptic.
Something thicker: heated metal, ozone, stale sweat.
And something subtler, that Kael recognized instantly.
Fear.
It had soaked into the walls.
They emerged onto a glass walkway overlooking a wide circular chamber.
Below, cylindrical modules were arranged like the spokes of a wheel, each connected to a central ring by glowing cables.
At the center, a column of blue‑white light rose from floor to ceiling, pulsing in rhythm with the shields.
"There it is," Lysa murmured. "The heart."
Aiden stepped up to the railing.
His eyes swept across consoles, corridors, energy patterns.
"They're using the collars as relays," he said, voice low but tight. "Every module feeds data into the central pillar. Power output, reaction to stimuli, resistance levels… it all routes there."
Lysa smiled without humor.
"That's what we came for," she said. "A map of their cruelty."
Kael was only half listening.
His gaze had locked onto one of the modules.
Behind the glass, a figure sat strapped into a chair, held down by glowing restraints.
An active collar ringed their throat, runes alive and crawling.
Cables ran from the base of the collar to the central pillar.
The person's face was half hidden by a monitoring mask, but the taut line of their shoulders, the uncontrollable tremors Kael knew those.
"They're testing live," he growled.
Aiden followed his eyes.
His stomach lurched.
A pulse surged through the central pillar.
The figure jerked violently, arching against the restraints.
Fingers clenched hard enough to draw blood.
The indicators around the module flipped from green to orange.
"Stimulus E‑four," a neutral voice announced over the speakers. "Resistance increasing. Amplifying dose."
Another current, stronger.
The figure screamed, but the sound was muffled by the glass.
The color drained from Aiden's face.
He had seen numbers, reports, percentages.
Not this.
"Lioren," Lysa said, tone calm but barely masking fury, "tell me your little crystal can record all of that."
Aiden took out the second sliver smaller, shielded by layers of Taro's code.
"It doesn't have to be big," he said. "It just has to see."
He pressed it against the railing.
The runes on its surface lit up, locking onto the pillar's frequency.
Streams of data began to flow unseen, but caught by the crystal.
"It's copying the energy vectors and the attached logs," Aiden explained. "Every pulse, every reaction. Torture turned into charts, impossible to fake."
Kael finally tore his eyes away from the module.
His hands were shaking.
"We can't leave them here," he said.
Lysa held his gaze.
"We did not come for a mass rescue," she reminded him. "You know that."
"I knew it when it was theoretical," Kael said, voice rough. "Right now, with them wired into your precious 'proof'? It's not theoretical."
Aiden set a hand on his sleeve.
"If we crack a module open now," he said, "the alarm hits max, shields tighten, Taro gets fried in his corner, and we don't even get time to exfil what we stole. We lose everything."
"They already lost everything," Kael shot back.
Silence.
The column pulsed again, indifferent to their arguments.
Lysa drew in a long breath.
"We're not saints," she said. "We're strategists. But…"
She broke off, eyes scanning the lower levels.
A side corridor led down to the modules.
A control panel sat beside each door.
"You said you wanted something worth dying for," she said at last, eyes back on Kael. "I'd rather offer you something worth surviving for."
"Make it fast," Aiden whispered. "This is not the time for a morality lecture."
"It's not," Lysa answered. "It's a compromise."
She pointed at the central pillar.
"Aiden, you pull everything you can and set up a controlled overload," she said. "Strong enough to fry the collar control system in this ring, not strong enough to kill everyone."
"You're asking me to implode the heart without taking the building with it," Aiden said. "Ambitious."
"You're good," Lysa replied. "Prove it."
She turned to Kael.
"You're coming with me to the module level," she said. "The second the collars drop, we open as many doors as we can and give them a chance to run. Not a miracle, not a full liberation. A chance."
Something unlocked in Kael's chest.
Not enough to soothe the rage.
Just enough to aim it.
"Now you're talking," he said.
Aiden clenched his jaw.
"If I mess this up," he warned, "either no one gets free or everyone burns."
"Then don't mess it up," Lysa said.
There was no right answer.
Only the one they were about to choose.
***
The corridor leading to the modules was even quieter than the rest.
Each door had a small opaque window, a badge reader, and a physical lock.
A single guard patrolled, boredom just starting to edge his walk.
Lysa strode forward with the confidence of someone who had a thousand reasons to be there.
"Stability inspection," she called.
The guard startled.
"I haven't received any notice about that," he said.
Lysa tilted her chin.
"Do you want to be the one who tells Orion he ignored a surprise check on the most unstable units in the sector?" she asked.
The name dropped between them like a weight.
Orion.
Even here, people said it with a mix of fear and respect.
The guard cleared his throat.
"No, ma'am," he said quickly. "Of course not. What do you need?"
"Your access codes for a random sampling," Lysa said. "And ten minutes where you're not underfoot."
Kael watched the exchange, torn between fascination and grudging admiration.
Lysa could twist protocol until it creaked.
The guard hesitated only a second before handing over a keycard.
"I'll… check with central," he muttered. "See if there are any extra instructions."
"Do that," Lysa said.
He hurried off.
The moment he turned the corner, Lysa grabbed Kael's arm.
"We have exactly the time it takes him to realize no one up there ordered this inspection," she said. "Ready?"
"No," he answered. "Do it anyway."
She swiped the card at the first reader.
The door clicked.
Inside, a young woman was strapped to the chair, eyes half‑closed, collar glowing with a sick light.
Kael flashed back: his own blurred vision, a similar room, fire in every nerve.
"Aiden," Lysa murmured into the comm, "tell me you're making progress."
"The flows are messier than I thought," he answered, voice tight. "But I've got a breakpoint. Fifty‑two seconds to shut everything down or blow it all. Pick your prayer."
Kael stepped closer to the chair.
The woman's eyes fluttered.
They were cloudy, but something still burned behind them—a spark that refused to die.
"Hey," he said softly. "We're about to break some locks. When it happens, you run. Don't look back."
"Is… this another test?" she whispered.
Her voice was raw, scraped by silent screams.
"No," Kael said. "This is a mistake the Order made. They let us in."
A strangled laugh slipped out of her.
Lysa was already unlocking the physical restraints, leaving the energy clamps alone—for now, the active collar still called the shots.
"Aiden, your signal," she said.
At the central pillar, Aiden braced the sliver against the railing with one hand and his own magic with the other.
He could feel the currents around him: a dense grid tuned to the nanosecond.
"If I cut here," he muttered, more to himself than to them, "the overload rides the secondary lines, fries the modules, but leaves life‑support intact. In theory."
He hated that word.
But he'd learned to live with it.
He drew a breath.
"Thirty seconds," he announced. "If you're not holding onto something solid, find it."
"Already done," Kael said.
He had one hand on the woman's shoulder, anchoring his anger as a shield.
"Fifteen," Aiden said.
Magic pooled at his fingertips, ready to strike the node he'd chosen.
The blue‑white column pulsed, ignoring him.
"Five," he breathed.
In the corridor, Lysa set her palm against the inside panel.
Cold sweat slid down her spine.
They'd bet the whole operation on this.
"Three. Two. One."
Aiden struck.
His power plunged into the node like a blade into a heart.
For an instant, nothing moved.
Then the pillar screamed.
The blue‑white light flared into blinding white, then shattered into a thousand fracture lines.
A wave raced along the cables to the modules.
The collars all flared at once, crowns of poisoned stars.
Kael felt the dead shell at his throat vibrate, tempted to wake as if it still had a system to answer to.
"No," he growled.
He grabbed the rising power bleeding through the grid, twisted it, drank it down.
Pain ripped through him, sharp and brutal.
Not the controlled agony of an active collar something wilder, a foreign current searching for an exit.
He shoved it into his hands, into the floor, anywhere but his bones.
The hollow collar burst in a spray of sparks, then went dark for real, truly inert in every sense.
In front of him, the woman's real collar crackled.
Runes flickered, uncertain.
Then, one by one, they went out.
Energy locks slackened.
The magic they'd been holding spilled out like a breath held too long.
Kael felt a shiver race down the corridor a surge from other cells, other bodies finally loosening.
"It's working," Lysa breathed, eyes wide. "Aiden, you did it."
"For the moment," he panted. "But the systems are going to try to reboot. You've got… two minutes, maybe. Three, if I keep them busy."
Alarms began to howl, out of sync, like they were arguing over what message to send.
Lysa ripped free the last straps.
"Up," she told the young woman. "Now. You run for the nearest emergency exit, you follow the others."
"The… others?"
Lysa's smile was vicious.
"Didn't they tell you?" she said. "This isn't a test. It's a riot."
Doors were already slamming open all along the hall.
Farther down, figures staggered, fell, pushed themselves up.
Some eyes were dazed, others suddenly bright with returning clarity.
Kael glanced at the shattered shell at his feet.
He didn't bother picking it up.
"One minute fifty," Aiden growled. "After that, no promises."
Kael steadied the woman by the arm.
Behind them, Lysa was already at the next cell.
The heart of Twelve‑North was beating off‑rhythm.
For the first time in a long time, it wasn't to the Order's tempo.