Daphne turned the laptop slightly so her sister could read the message. Celeste’s eyes widened.
“How does he know that?” she asked quietly.
“I don’t know.” Daphne’s fingers hovered over the keyboard, uncertain for the first time in their year-long correspondence. “I didn’t tell him.”
“Then how?—”
“I don’t know.” But she was going to find out.
Lovelace: How do you know that?
The reply came almost immediately.
Titan: Because I’m looking there too. For entirely different reasons that just happened to converge with yours.
Lovelace: That doesn’t answer my question.
And, in fact, only raised more.
The typing indicator appeared, disappeared, appeared again. He was choosing his words carefully.
Titan: I can’t explain in this format. Look up a name for me. Strauss. Heinrich Strauss.
Daphne was already typing before she’d consciously decided to. She launched the specialized search tools she’d built for exactly this kind of intelligence gathering, pulling databases faster than most people could open browser tabs. HeinrichStrauss. German. Neurologist. She narrowed her search further, discarding the clean academic record and going for what came after — the ethics violations, the Max Planck censure, the work that had made legitimate scientists run in the opposite direction.
“What are you finding?” Celeste leaned over her shoulder.
“Give me a minute.”
The information populated her screens in fragments, some of it heavily redacted, pulled from secured servers her program had found its way into. Neural mapping. Biological regeneration. Identity anchoring. Synaptic stabilization. The research was groundbreaking and deeply wrong in a way that was hard to articulate but impossible to miss — the kind of work that treated human beings as engineering problems.
Based on what she could piece together through the redactions, Strauss had developed theoretical frameworks for preserving and transferring neural pathways — essentially the components of personality, memory, and identity — during extreme physical trauma.
Her mouth went dry. She grabbed her cooling coffee to wet it before speaking.
“They’re trying to create unkillable soldiers,” she said and looked up at her sister. “I think… Praetorian wants to build an army that can’t die.”
ten
They‘d beenat it for thirty-six hours, or close to it—the schematics spread across the dining table, empty coffee cups pushed to one end, both tablets propped against the breakfast bowl Dom had conscripted as a stand. He’d memorized the sublevel layouts, the patrol rotation timings, the biometric checkpoint architecture. He was starting on his third pass through the seismic sensor grid when the television flickered on without warning, and Raines’s face appeared on the screen.
“Change of plans,” Raines said, without preamble and without apology. “You’re being moved to the property today. A car will arrive in twenty minutes.”
Dom felt Vivi go still across the table. He kept his own face neutral, which took more effort than he‘d like to admit.
“We’re not ready,” Vivi said. “You gave us a week.”
“I gave you seven days to complete the job. This is day two.” Raines’s tone had all the warmth of the concrete room they’d woken up in. “Being on-site accelerates the timeline and removes certain logistical complications. Pack what you’ve been given. Twenty minutes.”
The screen went dark.
Dom looked at Vivi. She looked back at him. Neither of them said a word for a long beat.
“Logistical complications,” he said finally.
“Right.” She was already rolling up the nearest schematic, her movements practiced and efficient. “Because telling us the real reason would be too much like a courtesy.”
He filed his copies away in order—sublevel diagrams first, security overlays second, entry schematics on top—and started running the scenarios his brain had already begun queuing the moment Raines signed off.