Chapter 3 THREE

"As of 0900 hours we have confirmed contact with four of the five destroyers."

Dave's voice did not shake. Ken noticed that immediately. Forty three survivors in the room and every one of them was holding something back. Fear. Grief. Shock. But Dave stood in front of the tactical display and his voice was level and his face showed nothing.

Ken understood that kind of control. He had been practising it his whole life.

"The Lady of Chaos is moving toward this base. Forty minutes. Maybe less."

The room tightened like a fist.

Ken stood at the edge. He always found the edge. The place that was not quite inside anything. He watched faces process the number. Men and women engineered from birth for exactly this. Chosen. Selected. Optimised. And they were afraid.

He knew that fear. He had just never seen it on faces like these before.

"Our objective is not engagement. Preservation of combat capacity. We move to the secondary facility in ten minutes. Anyone not ready gets left."

Dave's eyes moved across the room as he said it. Counting. Assessing. They landed on Ken for two seconds.

Something moved across Dave's face. Ken could not name it.

Then it was gone.

The room broke into motion. Ken did not move. He stayed looking at the tactical display. The Lady of Chaos was a red marker moving steadily from the city centre toward the base. Every other marker near hers was simply gone.

'She is not moving toward the base.'

"Correct," AIDEN said quietly. "She is moving toward you. She can sense me. Which means as long as you are with the group, you are leading her directly to them."

Ken closed his eyes for three seconds.

He opened them.

He picked up his kit and walked toward the back exit. Not the main one everyone else was using. The back one that faced north.

"Ken."

He stopped.

Dave was standing behind him. Alone. The rest of the room still moving. Nobody watching this corner.

"You are not evacuating," Dave said.

"No."

Dave looked at him the same way he had from the display. That expression Ken could not name. Up close it was stronger. Like looking at something familiar in completely wrong packaging.

"You have no band."

"I know."

"No classified power signature."

"I know."

"Then what exactly are you planning to do?"

Ken met his eyes.

"Something," he said. "Which is more than nothing."

A long moment passed between them. Dave reached into his kit. He held out a secondary weapon without explanation.

Ken took it.

Neither of them said anything else.

Ken walked out the back exit into the pale ruined light of the morning.

He found her twelve minutes later.

The Lady of Chaos stood in the middle of a collapsed street with rubble on every side and she was completely still. No urgency. No aggression. She looked at Ken the way you look at something you arranged to be there.

"There you are," she said.

Her voice landed somewhere behind his sternum. He felt it in his blood.

"You have something inside you that does not belong to you," she said. She tilted her head slowly. "Or perhaps it is the other way around."

"Move away from the evacuation route," Ken said.

She smiled.

"Little lost son." Her eyes did not leave his. "You do not even know what you are yet."

'AIDEN.'

"Now," AIDEN said.

Ken moved.

He covered the distance in under two seconds. Hit her with everything AIDEN had given him. Every enhancement. Every upgrade. Every edge the system had built into his body across the last few hours.

She caught him.

Not like a fighter catches a strike. Like gravity catches a falling object. Complete and effortless. She lifted him off the ground by the throat and looked at him with something that was almost sad.

"You will die many times before you understand," she said. "The first one is always the worst."

She closed her hand.

Ken died.

He opened his eyes.

0400 hours.

The alarm tore through the base. He was in his bunk. The ceiling above him. The sound of someone snoring in the corner. Morning light just beginning through the window.

He sat up and grabbed his own throat with both hands.

Nothing. No marks. No pain.

He sat on the edge of his bunk and stared at the floor for a long time.

He remembered everything. Every second of the day that had not happened yet. The breach. AIDEN. The forty three survivors. Dave's hand holding out a weapon without a word. The Lady of Chaos closing her fingers.

All of it.

"AIDEN," he whispered.

"I am here," the voice said. Quieter. Like it was recalibrating. "The loop activated at the point of death. You reset. But you retain every memory. Every loop. Every death."

Outside the window the sky was still the right colour.

Four hours before it was not.

"How many times is this going to happen," Ken said.

"As many times as it takes."

Ken looked at the soldiers sleeping around him. Men and women who had no idea what was coming. Who would wake up and deploy and some of them would not come back and none of them would have a second chance.

He had one.

He did not feel lucky.

He stood up. Laced his boots. Walked to the door.

"You have four hours," AIDEN said.

"I know."

He stepped outside into the dark and began to run.

Behind him in the bunk room, the medic with the broken arm opened her eyes.

She had not been asleep.

She reached under her mattress and pressed a small device twice.

Somewhere across the city, a signal was received.