"Don't mention it," she says, already ahead of me.
"I wasn't going to."
"Your face was going to."
My knee aches. My pride aches worse. But my legs are moving and the bag is secure and the bypass kit didn't spill and the corridor ahead is clear, and the difference between aman who falls and a man who stays down has never been more relevant than right now.
Legs pumping and my breathing stays controlled and my body knows how to move because I've trained it, alone, at midnight, in a gym nobody watched. The irony that the discipline I hid from my team is the thing keeping me functional right now is the kind of cosmic joke I'd appreciate more if I weren't sprinting toward armed hostiles.
Dar runs beside me. Lighter, faster, her equipment bag clutched against her chest with both hands.
Her cap has shifted, and a streak of rainbow hair escapes along her temple, vivid against the darkness.
She runs the way she types. In bursts. Efficient, precise, conserving energy between accelerations.
I know the mechanics of her body well enough now to read the rhythm, and the intimacy of that knowledge in this context, recognizing her movement patterns in a combat zone because I learned them in a bed, is a cognitive dissonance I'll unpack later.
We enter through the ground floor. The assault team has already swept it. Two Committee operatives are down, zip-tied by Mercer, and their weapons collected.
The corridor smells like burnt powder and sweat and the particular metallic scent that adrenaline leaves in enclosed spaces.
"Digital nerve center, second floor, east wing." Victoria's voice guides us through the layout. "Third door on the right. Air-gapped server room with independent power supply. Expect electronic locks and possibly a manual failsafe."
Mercer straightens from securing the second operative and sees me. His eyebrows rise a fraction.
"Hale. I want you to know." He keeps his voice low, but the edge of his mouth twitches. "Stryker owes me twenty bucks. I bet you'd make it all the way."
"Your faith is overwhelming."
The bet registers a beat late. Mercer watched my gym sessions on the security feed. Stryker knows about the midnight training. The information settles into the corridor like a puzzle piece clicking into a picture I didn't know was being assembled.
They saw. The pull-up bar, the dead lifts, the systematic hours of building a body I thought I was building in secret. They saw it on the feeds I maintain, through the cameras I installed, and they said nothing. Not because they didn't care. Because they understood that the man behind the screens needed to believe his privacy was intact, and respecting the illusion was its own form of loyalty.
Mercer didn't bet on the version of me that sits behind a desk. He bet on the version he watched through a camera at two in the morning, and the trust implicit in that distinction is something I'll carry out of this building regardless of what else happens inside it.
"Wasn't faith. I've seen your gym logs on the security feed." He jerks his chin toward the stairs. "Second floor. Go."
Third door on the right. We take the stairs, Dar ahead of me, her boots silent on the treads. The second-floor corridor is dimmer than the first. Emergency lighting only, casting everything in amber and shadow.
Dar reaches the door a second before me. The door is locked, electronic, keypad access with a biometric overlay.
I pull the bypass kit from my bag. My hands are steady. They're always steady when I'm working, because the interface between my mind and the machine is the one place where doubt has never lived.
Three seconds. The lock disengages. Dar pushes the door open.
The server room is cold and humming. Banks of equipment line the walls, blinking with the steady rhythm of active systems.
Webb's air-gapped network. Isolated from the outside world. Containing every record of every crime the Committee has committed across the span of this war.
"We're in." My voice in the comms.
"Copy. You have twelve minutes. Assault team is securing the upper floors." Kane.
Twelve minutes. Under normal circumstances, this would be a challenge I'd find exhilarating from the safety of my workstation with coffee and chocolate and the comfortable distance of screens between me and the consequences.
Under these circumstances, with gunfire intermittently popping through the floors above and Dylan's voice calling "clear" from room to room, it's the most focused twelve minutes of my life.
I unpack the bridge hardware. Dar takes her position at the terminal, her fingers already flying before her bag hits the floor.