I step to the hatch, grip the wheel, and turn. My shoulders scream, the muscles tearing and knitting from old wounds, but the mechanism groans, gives, and releases. The hatch opens on a throat of pure darkness. I look up. Three hundred feet. I’ve free-climbed buildings in Montreal for extraction jobs. I’ve scaled silos in Kansas with bullet holes in my thigh. The physical capability wasn’t the question. “Most of the kids can’t climb,” I say, assessing the width of the shaft. Too narrow to carry them on my back. I’ll be an anchor. Kiera, you’re behind me. We rope them to us. Two lines. I pull, you push from below. We move as a chain.” Kierais already tearing fabric strips from her shirt and the kids' gowns, her movements quick and ruthless.
“You can’t carry seventeen bodies three hundred feet,” Reyes says, disbelief edging her voice. “Not even you, Ghost.”
I grab the first rung. Metal flakes under my palm, but it holds. I test my weight. Solid. I look back at Kiera, at the seventeen faces pale in the flashlight glow—Subject 014, the girl with the scarred wrist, the boy with the burn on his cheek, the twins, holding hands. “I’m not carrying them,” I say, already starting up the shaft. “I’m leading them. They climb. They’ve survived this place. They can climb.”
“Sterling,” Kiera warns, her voice tight with urgency. “The smoke…”
“I know.” I climb five feet, find a stable rung, and brace my back against the opposite wall of the narrow shaft, creating a human wedge. “Pass me the first one. Now.” I could smell smoke now—acrid, burning plastic—sinking down the tunnel like a predator. Fire is consuming the oxygen below, snaking its way up.
Evelyn lifts the smallest child, a boy of maybe six, and passes him up. He is limp, drug-heavy, but his eyes flutter open when I take him under the arms. I lock him against my chest with one arm, gripping the rungs with the other. “Hold on,” I command. “To me or the ladder. Your choice. But don’t let go.” I climb.Fifteen feet…twenty…The rungs are slick with condensation, and God knows what else from years of neglect. My boots scrape the wall behind me for some added stability. The boy’s fingers dig into my neck, panic overriding sedation.
Below, I hear Kiera’s voice—calm and deadly. “Evelyn, you pass them up. If you drop one, I'll shoot you. Dr. Reyes, you’re last. Move.” Thirty feet. The air was thinning, growing hotter. My arms shake, but thememory of other climbs holds me steady: construction sites, fire escapes. I was built for this…molded for vertical escapes.I will not let them down.Forty feet… I pass the first child up to a ledge I find in the dark. A maintenance platform, maybe. He collapses there, gasping. “Next,” I call down, my voice echoing in the shaft. One by one. The older girl is light as a bird, climbing better than expected, her fingers finding holds I can’t even see. A heavier boy, twelve or thirteen, I have to drag most of the way, his feet scrambling against my legs. After the eighth kid, I start climbing again to make room for the others on the platform. Seventy feet…ninety... The smoke reaches us, a grey curtain rising from below. I hear coughing—Kiera, harsh and angry. Reyes, weaker. “Faster,” I growl, hauling up the tenth child. Two hundred feet… My arms are lead, my shoulders burning. I’ve lost feeling in three of the fingers on my left hand. But the rungs keep coming, and I keep climbing, wedging myself between the walls when I need to rest, passing the kids to the ledges as we find them.
At two hundred fifty feet, I find the exit hatch. A metal grate, bolted from the outside. I don’t have a tool. I brace my back against the wall, shielding the children with my body the best I can, and draw my pistol with my free hand. Three shots crack through the shaft—deafening in the enclosed space. The bolt shatters. I ram my shoulder into the grate, bursting it wide open. Cold mountain air slams into my face, sharp enough to cut. Trees. Open sky. Stars. I haul myself and the babies strapped to my chest out, then one by one, the children behind me. I lie on pine needles, chest heaving, and reach back into the hole. “Kiera,” I shout, voice raw and rough. “Now!”
Her hand bursts from the smoke-wreathed dark, reaching for mine, fingers slick with blood. I seize her wrist and gently haul her up as the first of the mercenaries’ spotlights sweeps the ridgeline fifty yards away. “We’re out,” Kiera gasps against my neck. But I was already scanning the shadows, counting heads, my free hand never leaving my weapon. Seventeen. We needed seventeen.
Evelyn claws her way out next, dragging a limp Dr. Reyes by the collar while two tiny babies are strapped awkwardly to her chest with torn fabric. Behind her comes the last of the older children—one of the twins—her face grey with ash, eyes unnervingly clear in the moonlight. I count again. Sixteen. “Where’s the last one?” I snarl, already lunging back toward the hatch, smoke still pouring out like the mountain itself is exhaling death.
Kiera catches my arm. “Sterling, stop.” But I already see him. The last boy—younger than the rest—frozen four feet down the shaft, paralyzed by height or the smoke. His fingers slip on the rusted rungs. I dive back into the hole. My arms are jelly, burning from the climb, but I reach him just as he falls. I catch his wrist. His full weight yanks hard, nearly ripping my shoulder from the socket. I hang there. One hand locked on a crumbling rung, the other gripping the boy over a three-hundred-foot drop. Smoke curls up around us like hungry fingers. His terrified eyes lock on mine.
“Climb,” I growl at the boy. “Or we both die.” He scrambles up me like I’m the rungs, small hands clawing my shoulders, knees digging into my ribs. The second Kiera hauls him out, I drag myself over the lip of the hatch and collapse onto the forest floor. Boots thunder closer. Mercenaries cutting through the trees. I scan the brush. Seventeen small shapes crouched low, trembling but alive. Free. Then my eyes find Kiera. Soot and blood streak her face. One hand rests unconsciously over her belly like she’s shielding something she hasn’t said out loud yet. “We need to go,” I whisper, my voice rough. “Into the trees. Now.” We meltinto the dark like ghosts, seventeen stolen lives, and the women carrying our future vanishing with us.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Pine branches whip across my face, slicing thin lines of blood I don’t bother to wipe away. My lungs feel like shattered glass—every breath is a fresh punishment. Behind me, the older eleven children move like ghosts. Silent. Terrified. Their bare feet make no sound on the forest floor because they’ve been trained, beaten, and conditioned not to make noise. Sterling is ahead, half-carrying the boy who can’t walk, his gown hanging in tatters at the shoulder where the rusted metal tore him open. Dark blood runs down his spine in a slow, glistening river, but he doesn’t falter. “Left,” Sterling breathes, the word barely audible over the wind and our ragged breathing.
I veer left, dragging the girl with me. She’s twelve, maybe thirteen, her fingers locked around mine like talons. She hasn’t let go since the tunnel. Behind us, mercenary flashlights carve through the trees. Too close. One beam passes inches from my face, lighting up the thick smoke still belching from the mountain’s throat. The Nesting House burns behind us, its secrets collapsing into ash and molten stone.Good. Let it burn.
My mom moves ahead of us, her lavender dress sticking out among the pines—torn, soot-stained, fluttering like a ghost that refuses to die. She carries a baby in each arm like they’re groceries, not living things. Their tiny heads bob against her shoulders with every step. Her pearls catch the moonlight. My pearls. I hate how perfectly we match. “Threehundred yards.” Cam’s voice breaks through the static in my ear. “Abandoned ranger station. East bearing. Lila’s ten minutes out with the truck. Keep moving.”Ten minutes.An eternity when you’re bleeding, lungs burning, and the woods are crawling with men who have night vision and orders to sanitize every last trace of us.
A child stumbles. He goes down hard, knees crack against rock, and a whimper rips from his throat. Too loud. I drop beside him, clamping my hand over his mouth. His eyes are wild, the whites flashing in the dark like a cornered animal’s. “I’ve got you,” I whisper, my voice fracturing. “I’ve got you.” But I don’t. Not really. My body shakes so violently that my teeth click together. A sharp, twisting cramp rips through my abdomen, stealing my breath in a gasp. I slam my free hand against the nearest tree trunk, bark gouging into my palm as I fight to stay upright.
Sterling appears beside me. He doesn’t ask if I’m okay. He sees it in the shake of my hands, the way I’m folded against the tree. Without a word, he simply lifts the boy, settling him on his hip with the effortless strength of a man who’s carried far heavier burdens his entire life. He extends his other hand to me. I take it. His palm is shredded from the climb—slick with blood and sap, but his grip is iron. Unbreakable.Mine.We move again, faster now, urgency snapping at our heels.
The ranger station materializes out of the dark—a rotting cabin with boarded windows and a collapsed chimney. It reeks of mildew and old smoke. Sterling kicks the door open, weapon up, sweeping every corner before he nods. “In. Now.” We spill inside. Seventeen children, filthy and shivering. Dr. Reyes limps in behind my mother, stiff, half-conscious, and stumbling. I collapse against the wall, absently checking my hand for splinters. The door slams shut. Sterling wedges a chair under the handle, then another. Silence falls. Not safety. Just silence. The children huddletogether in the center of the room, a knot of bruised limbs and matted hair.
I slide down the wall until my ass hits the dirty floor, legs giving out completely. My mom stands by the boarded window, peering through a crack. Moonlight cuts across her face, turning her into a living photograph I’ve memorized a thousand times. Same sharp cheekbones. Same hairline. Same slight tilt of her head, like she's listening to a song only she can hear. But there’s a coldness in her now. Something sharp and metallic that wasn’t there before. “Who were you texting?” I ask, my voice edged with caution.
“That’s not…” My mom’s voice cuts off mid-sentence.
“In the tunnel. Before the blast. You checked your phone. “ I lever myself up the wall, legs trembling, refusing to give out. “Who were you reporting to?” Sterling looks up from the boy he’s tending, his hands pausing mid-motion. His gaze snaps between us—sharp, lethal, already calculating the silent threat.
Mom turns slowly. Her expression is serene, maddeningly calm, like she’s discussing the weather instead of the mountain we just set on fire. “No one. I told you I was waiting for you. For both of you. To activate the failsafe.”
“Fucking bullshit.” I take a step toward her, and my knees buckle. Sterling catches me before I hit the floor, his arm wrapping around my waist, pulling me against his chest. For one heartbeat, his body tenses, hard and protective, ready to put himself between me and whatever fresh lie is coming. He sets me carefully back on my feet, never once taking his eyes off my mom. “You were logged in,” I continue, voice low and filled with venom, leaning into the solid wall of Sterling at my back. “Ward C.You could have left anytime. But you stayed for years. You weren’t hiding.”
Mom shifts, watching us with the cool detachment of a scientist observing a petri dish. “I was ensuring the subjects were safe and viable,” she says simply. “Including you. Especially you.” The words land like a slap.Viable.Like we’re experiments.
Sterling steps between us, his weapon sliding into his hand like it was born there. Not pointed at her. Not yet. Just present—a silent, steel wall between the woman who used to sing me to sleep and me. “You’re going to start talking,” he says, voice low and dangerous, the kind of rumble that makes the air feel heavier. “About the facility. About the seventeen kids. About who the fuck you’ve been reporting to all these years. And you’re going to do it fast…Before I decide that keeping you alive is no longer in our best interest.”
Mom’s smiles. It’s my smile, but sharpened into something cruel and precise. “I’ll tell you everything,” she says softly. “But first, you need to understand—you didn’t rescue these children tonight, Sterling. You signed their death warrants. And yours.” Her gaze slides to me. “Because the people I work for? They don’t lose assets. They reclaim them. And they’ve been waiting sixteen years to see if the original pairing would stabilize.”
My blood runs cold. “What pairing?” But I already know. I know before the words leave her mouth. I feel it in the sharp twist low in my belly, in the way Sterling’s arm tightens around my waist. Like he can physically hold back the truth.
“The one they engineered,” Mom says softly. “Before you were even born. Before Wade knew what he had. Before I knew what they’d taken from me.”
Outside, distant but closing fast, the low thump of helicopter rotors slices through the mountain air. Mom’s phone buzzes in her pocket. She doesn’t glance at it. “They’re almost here,” she says, calm as still water.