The room released her without warning.
One moment Siara stood inside compressed silence, the next the air folded outward and she staggered forward onto cold concrete. Her boots scraped, momentum misjudged, body catching up to a location it hadn't traveled to.
Containment lights flared.
"Contact—!"
Zane moved first. He was already between Siara and the raised rifles when Luna's telekinesis snapped into place, an invisible brace that bent the air just enough to stop fingers from pulling triggers.
"Hold," Luna said, breath tight.
The pressure eased.
Tanya's tablet chirped, then screamed—graphs spiking into unreadable noise before crashing back to baseline. She stared at the screen, then at Siara, then at the empty space behind her.
"That's not a breach," Tanya said. "That's… a return."
Zane lowered his weapon slowly. "You just vanished."
Siara nodded once. Her pulse was steady. Her head was clear. Whatever Richard had done, it hadn't damaged her.
Luna stepped closer, eyes searching Siara's face like she expected to find fractures. There were faint traces of blood still at the corners of Luna's eyes—evidence of strain that hadn't fully faded.
"I didn't pull you," Luna said quietly.
"I know," Siara answered.
They didn't say his name.
The facility around them came back into focus: reinforced walls layered with suppression fields, floor markings denoting blast radii and kill zones, sealed vault doors stamped with Phantom insignia. This wasn't a forward lab. It was storage. Contingency. A place where dangerous answers were locked away until someone decided to ask the wrong question.
Tanya turned slowly, sweeping her scanner across the room. "Whatever moved you didn't leave a trail. Just residual curvature." She paused. "Which means Omega is active again."
Zane exhaled through his teeth. "So we're on borrowed time."
They moved deeper into the containment wing, following Tanya's readings. The corridor widened into a vault chamber—high ceiling, magnetic clamps lining the walls, each holding something that looked less like a weapon and more like an argument against survival.
And there it was.
Mounted upright in a reinforced cradle, surrounded by warning glyphs and thermal dampeners.
Gamma-9.
It didn't glow. It didn't hum. The launcher was matte-black, segmented, cleanly engineered. No unnecessary edges. No intimidation by design. It looked like a tool—efficient, deliberate, merciless.
Zane stopped short. "That's the one."
Luna frowned. "Plasma?"
Tanya nodded. "Highly compressed. Directional. Five thousand degrees on release." She swallowed. "It's meant to cut anomalies apart by overwhelming durability with heat and shear."
Siara stepped closer.
The weapon's housing recognized movement and unlocked with a muted click. No alarms. No resistance. Phantom hadn't expected anyone without clearance to make it this far—or had assumed no one would live long enough to matter.
Siara lifted Gamma-9 free of its cradle.
The weight settled naturally into her hands, balanced in a way that felt intentional. The barrel segmented slightly, internal plates shifting as the weapon powered up to standby. A thin line of contained plasma flickered deep inside, barely visible, like a star seen through smoked glass.
"This isn't for crowd control," Zane said.
"No," Tanya replied. "It's for proof."
Proof that something could still be hurt.
Luna watched Siara carefully. "You're sure you can use that?"
Siara didn't answer immediately. Her eyes were on the launcher, on the fine seams where containment met violence.
"Phantom built this to test him," Tanya continued. "Not to win. To see if human engineering still mattered."
Siara shouldered the weapon.
No surge of emotion followed. No hesitation. Just clarity.
"They won't get to decide that," she said.
The facility shuddered—subtle, distant. Not an explosion. A pressure shift.
Tanya's tablet spiked again.
"Something just distorted the outer perimeter," she said. "Localized. Controlled."
Omega was moving.
Luna closed her eyes briefly, steadying herself. "He's close."
Zane tightened his grip on his weapon. "Then we don't stay."
They moved fast, Gamma-9 cradled securely, Tanya guiding them through maintenance corridors and blind spots in Phantom's surveillance. Somewhere above them, systems adjusted, defenses reoriented, unaware that the variable they feared most was already rewriting the rules they depended on.
As they reached the exit corridor, Siara glanced back once—at the vault, the weapons, the quiet arrogance of a place built to study gods.
Richard hadn't sent her here to hide.
He had sent her here to balance the field.
And as the doors sealed behind them, Gamma-9 powered down to silence