Arlo didn't go back to Jen's monitoring room.
He found an empty operations office two floors down, keyed it open, and stepped inside. The door shut with a soft click that felt more dangerous than any slam.
For a few seconds, he just stood there.
The projection screen on the far wall was dark glass, reflecting a warped version of him,tie slightly askew, cheek already reddening where Ariel's hand had landed, eyes too bright. He crossed the room and hit the switch.
The floor plan flared to life.
Centralized lockups. Control room. Vent lines. The small red X he'd told Jen marked a weakness he wanted sealed.
He stared at it until his vision blurred.
"You're an idiot," he muttered.
Not for the plan. The plan was the only thing standing between Ariel and whatever Reed and Jen had really built this place for. The idiot part was thinking he could carve out an escape route and still keep the people in that cell from hating him for how he hid it.
His cheek throbbed in time with his heartbeat.
He lifted his fingers and pressed them lightly against the sting, feeling the faint welt along his skin. The slap replayed in his head: the sound, the look in her eyes right after—shocked, furious, something in her going dark in a way he wasn't sure anything could bring back.
Good, he told himself.
Let it die.
If she believed even for a second that the cruelty was an act, she'd look for the man under it. And that man was the one Reed knew how to use.
His hand dropped.
He looked back at the X.
The vent wasn't just a vent. It was a choke point in the building's lungs, the one place where he could force air, smoke, gas, distraction into the right corridor at the right time.
If he timed it with a power fluctuation and a fire alarm, he could overload the system, trigger a local unlock, and maybe,maybe,pop the central cell for exactly long enough to move three people and slam it again before Reed's backup protocols kicked in.
Maybe.
"First, get them in one place," he'd thought, drawing that red mark. "Then figure out how to open the door without bringing the roof down."
Now they were in one place.
And if he miscalculated again, the roof wouldn't be what fell.
He scrubbed a hand over his face, fingers digging briefly into his eyes.
He could still hear Chris's voice in the cell, raw with hatred. You're just a fucking coward with a god complex and a dirty mouth. He could still see Ariel stumbling back, legs giving out, like his words had cut through bone.
"Focus," he said under his breath.
Feelings were a luxury. He'd burned too many of them already. What mattered now was timing, leverage, and the small, vicious fact that Jen trusted him just enough to give him tools he could turn.
He straightened and started to work.
On the tablet, he pulled up the maintenance schedule, cross‑referencing vent checks with security patrol routes. He added an innocuous note: "Reinforce grate ,central block line. Temporary camera blind required during welding."
If Reed signed off on it, Arlo would have ten minutes of partial blackout in front of the cell and a legitimate reason to have tools near that X.
Ten minutes to choose whether he was the monster he'd just sold them on—
or the man willing to die ugly so they didn't have to.
Down in the central lockup, the air had cooled a fraction.
Ariel sat on the narrow bench, back against the wall, knees drawn up. Chris kept one arm around her shoulders, his body angled like he was still ready to throw himself between her and the door at any second. Mara leaned against the opposite wall, arms folded tight, eyes on the vent Arlo had supposedly "flagged for security."
"Still thinking about him?" Mara asked quietly.
Ariel's laugh was small and bitter.
"I'm trying not to," she said. "Every time I blink, I see his face when he said those things. Like he'd practiced them."
Chris's jaw flexed.
"Let him be practiced," he muttered. "You know what I saw when he walked out?"
Ariel tilted her head a little, not quite meeting his eyes.
"What?"
"He didn't look back," Chris said. "Not once. That's not strength. That's someone who knows if he looks back, he cracks."
Mara pushed off the wall and moved closer, lowering her voice.
"We can't control what he's doing out there," she said. "We can control what we do in here. Which means we set some rules."
Ariel blinked.
"Rules," she repeated, like the word belonged in another life.
"Rule one," Mara said. "We don't use him as our only horizon. Our plan cannot be 'wait for Arlo Johnson to remember he has a heart.' That way lies stupid."
A faint, broken smile tugged at Chris's mouth.
"Agreed."
"Rule two," Mara continued, "we catalog the cell. Vent, bolts, hinges, screw heads, camera angle. If there's a way out that doesn't involve trusting the man who just called you a sedative, we find it."
Ariel's gaze drifted up to the vent.
The grate looked newer than the rest of the room,shinier bolts, less dust. For the first time, she noticed a faint scuff on the wall under it, like something had been pressed there recently and removed.
"Vent's been touched," she murmured.
Mara followed her look, eyes sharpening.
"Yeah," she said. "And not by standard maintenance. That's fresh tool work. Someone's either locking this place down harder,or leaving themselves a crack."
Chris stared at it, then at the camera in the corner.
"You think he…" He trailed off, the rest of the sentence catching in his throat. "No. Rule one."
Mara nodded once.
"Exactly. We assume nothing," she said. "But we remember that people who like cages usually build at least one door for themselves. If we find it, it becomes ours, not his."
Ariel drew a slow breath.
"Rule three?" she asked.
Mara looked at her.
"Rule three: whatever happens next, we walk out of here as ourselves," Mara said. "Not as the product Reed tried to sell, not as the monster Arlo just pretended to be, not as collateral damage in someone else's family war. Us."
Ariel let the words settle.
They didn't fix the fresh wound in her chest. They didn't erase the memory of Arlo's smirk or the feel of her palm hitting his cheek. But they gave the pain a shape that wasn't just him—a shape she could maybe stand up under.
"Okay," she whispered. "Then here's my rule four."
Both of them looked at her.
"If we ever get a choice," she said, voice shaking but clear, "between saving him and saving each other,I choose us."
Chris's grip tightened around her.
"Deal," he said immediately.
Mara nodded, eyes bright.
"Deal," she echoed.
Outside the cell, the corridor camera blinked, quietly tracking their every move.
Two floors up, Arlo Johnson added another quiet notation to a maintenance form and told himself he'd just made peace with the idea that if this plan worked, the people it saved might still never look at him as anything but the villain they'd seen today.
He hit send anyway.
By the time Arlo left the operations office, the building's nervous system had his fingerprints all over it.
The maintenance request he'd filed sat in the queue under three other routine tasks: a door sensor recalibration, a camera lens cleaning on sector eight, and a scheduled test of the fire suppression line in an empty storage bay.
On paper, his note about "reinforcing central block vent grate , temporary camera blind during weld" looked like boring, necessary housekeeping.
Reed's approval pinged his tablet ten minutes later with a single, lazy comment:
Don't melt my toys.
Arlo exhaled once through his nose.
He forwarded the order to a handpicked pair of Jen's techs,the ones who cared more about clean welds and overtime pay than about the politics of who was inside which cell.
"Meet me on twelve in twenty," he wrote. "Bring welding rig and portable shielding. Camera CN‑12‑4 will be offline during procedure as per authorization."
Twenty minutes.
He glanced at the wall clock.
Twenty minutes to walk back into the central block corridor like none of this mattered. Ten minutes of planned blind spot once the welding screens went up. Maybe thirty seconds,if the calculations held,to make the building hiccup hard enough that a single door might forget, briefly, that it was supposed to stay shut.
He slid the tablet into his pocket and headed for twelve.
Every step down the stairwell felt like the run‑up to a heist he hadn't told his crew they were part of.
The building starts to twitch
In the cell, time had gone strange.
There were no windows, just the hum of the vent and the distant, muffled thumps of a facility that never really slept.
Ariel had her head tipped back against the wall, eyes closed, tracking the sounds because looking at the door still pulled her back to the last thing Arlo had said.
Chris sat beside her, shoulder warm against hers, leg bouncing a restless rhythm. Mara stood near the door, counting under her breath.
"One‑and‑two‑and‑camera sweep," she murmured. "Pause. One‑and‑two‑and‑three—sweep back."
Ariel cracked an eye open.
"You're timing the camera," she said.
"Of course I'm timing the camera," Mara replied. "It blinks the same way every twelve seconds when it pans. Whoever configured this floor believes in consistency. Bless their lazy soul."
Chris snorted quietly.
"Let me guess," he said. "You've already figured out which corner is the least watched?"
Mara's mouth twitched.
"Back left, under the vent," she said. "But don't get excited. 'Least watched' still means 'watched enough to get shot if we try anything stupid.'"
Before he could answer, the lights flickered.
It was small,just a quick dip and surge,but it made all three of them tense automatically. The hum of the vent stuttered with it, then steadied, like the building had skipped a heartbeat and corrected.
Ariel's hand closed around Chris's sleeve.
"Tell me that's normal," she said.
Mara's gaze went to the ceiling, then the corners.
"Probably a systems test," she said, though her voice had gone tight. "Power reroute. Someone's playing with the grid."
She didn't add: or someone's planning something, but the thought hung there anyway.
Outside the central cell, the corridor looked the same,dull concrete, strip lighting, the camera eye above the door. The only new addition was the rolling cart two techs had pushed up against the wall beneath the vent with the red X.
One of them was already unpacking a compact welding rig and a pair of portable metal shields designed to protect nearby cameras and sensors from the flare.
Arlo stood with his hands in his pockets, watching.
"CN‑12‑4 will experience intermittent interference during the procedure," one tech recited, reading off the tablet. "Visual goes to static for the duration, audio stays live. System log will show authorized maintenance blackout, timestamped."
"Good," Arlo said. "Keep the shields angled to cover the cell door. Last thing Jen wants is stray light tripping a motion alert she didn't order."
The tech nodded, already half in the comfortable rhythm of his job.
Arlo's eyes flicked to the door.
He could hear nothing from inside,no raised voices, no impact on the walls. Just the low, steady hum of the ventilation line, vibrating faintly under his boots.
He checked his watch.
"On my mark," he said. "Power reduction in this corridor only, then you start. We want the system to think it's a localized draw from the welding kit, not a full‑floor issue."
The techs moved into place.
Arlo thumbed a code into the panel, triggering a pre‑set he'd hidden under harmless labels. To the central system, it would look like: "TEMPORARY LOAD SHIFT – MAINTENANCE USE ONLY." To him, it was the start of his first real test.
The lights dipped again.
This time, they stayed dimmer, settling into a lower, warmer glow that made the corridor feel narrower.
"In three," he said softly. "Two. One."
The welding arc bloomed behind the shields, a contained star that painted the hallway in brief flashes at the edges of the metal barriers. On the monitoring grid upstairs, camera CN‑12‑4 would be a rectangle of static and white bloom, exactly as the maintenance report said it should.
And in the system's deeper guts, the small, malicious script Arlo had slid in with the load shift walked itself toward a single line of code:
CELL‑12‑CENTRAL: AUTO‑LOCK RECHECK AFTER BROWNOUT.
If the timing held, there would be a hiccup—a tiny desync between the lock's "closed" status and the signal that confirmed it.
A blink.
A breath.
An opening.
Inside the cell: the hiccup
In the cell, the second flicker was harder to ignore.
The light strip overhead went from steady to low to steady again, but the door made a sound this time—a faint metallic click‑thunk that none of them had heard before.
All three froze.
"What was that?" Ariel whispered.
"Lock cycle," Chris said immediately. Years of bad rooms had taught him to recognize that sound. "Something just checked itself."
Mara was already moving.
She crossed to the door in three steps, dropping into a crouch beside the seam where metal met frame. Her fingers hovered a millimeter away, feeling for vibration without touching.
"There," she breathed. "Did you hear that?"
A faint electric buzz, then a soft, confused tick—like a mechanism trying to remember which position it belonged in.
Mara's eyes narrowed.
"Someone just made this thing doubt itself," she said. "Either the system's old and cranky, or…"
"Or?" Ariel pressed.
"Or someone told it to question its own lock for half a second."
Chris's pulse kicked.
"Can you do anything with that?" he asked.
"Not yet," Mara said. "I need to know if it repeats. Glitch once, it's noise. Glitch twice, it's a pattern. And patterns are doors."
Ariel's gaze snapped to the vent.
The hum had changed there too—barely, but enough that she noticed. There was a deeper vibration under it now, like distant thunder: the muffled roar of a welding torch biting into metal somewhere along the line.
"Someone's working on the vents," she said slowly. "Now. While the lock is…doubting."
Chris followed her look, then cut his eyes to Mara.
"You still sure we're not allowed to think about him in this plan?" he asked.
Mara's mouth tightened.
"Rule one stands," she said. "We don't trust him. But we also don't ignore physics. If the building wants to crack open around us, we're not too proud to crawl through the gap."
She rested her palm flat against the cold metal of the door.
"Next time it hiccups," she said quietly, "we're ready."
Outside, in the corridor, Arlo watched the progress bar on his tablet creep forward: LOCK STATUS RESYNC – 73%… 81%… 94%.
When it hit 100, the system would decide the door was sealed and happy again.
He had seen, on his own tiny monitor, the corresponding flicker of "UNCONFIRMED" that had flashed beside the central cell's lock for less than a beat.
It had worked.
They had just shared, through steel and code, their first unsaid signal:
The cage is not as solid as it looks.
Now he just had to survive long enough—and stay monstrous enough in their eyes—to use that weakness without tipping Reed and Jen to the fact that the man they'd put in charge of their prison was quietly timing its heartbeat for a break.
Jen didn't usually watch the maintenance logs in real time.
That was Reed's obsession: numbers, patterns, tiny blips he could weaponize. She preferred people. But when the lights dipped, the fire suppression line in sector eight pinged a test, and camera CN‑12‑4 spat static for a neat, documented twelve minutes, the system flagged an "irregular lock status check" on CELL‑12‑CENTRAL as a courtesy.
Reed caught it first.
"Mm," he said, seated sideways in her chair, one ankle hooked over a knee. "Our favorite room just had a nervous breakdown. Look at that—lock unconfirmed for 0.8 seconds. Then back to full compliance."
Jen turned from the live feed of the corridor.
The screen showed the log line: BROWNOUT EVENT – CORR 12. AUTO‑LOCK RECHECK – CELL‑12‑CENTRAL. STATUS: RESYNCED.
"Maintenance," she said. "Arlo filed a vent reinforcement request. You signed it."
"Mm‑hmm." Reed's mouth curled. "He also did that thing he does where he buries the interesting part in the boring part. Load shift label's cute. Script's cleaner than the usual house junk. If I didn't know him, I'd call it elegant."
Her jaw tightened.
"You think he's testing us," she said.
"I think," Reed replied, eyes bright, "that he's testing the room. The question is whether he's testing it for us—or for them."
He tapped the table with two fingers, thoughtful.
"Overreact and we spook him into moving faster," he mused. "Ignore it and we invite a second try. You like second tries, Jen?"
"Only when I'm the one taking them," she said.
She stared at the tiny, innocuous line of text for a long moment, then made a decision.
"Fine. Flag any repeat lock irregularities on twelve to my console only. No automatic alarms, no facility‑wide alerts."
"If Arlo Johnson wants to play with doors, I want a front‑row seat the next time he jiggles the handle."
Reed's grin widened.
"This is why I love working with you," he said. "You don't slam the book shut on a heist halfway through. You watch if the thief knows there's a second lock."
Arlo's window shrinks
In the corridor, the welders packed up, oblivious.
The grate above the red X now had an extra line of fresh metal along its edge, seams clean and neat. To any inspection, it looked more secure than before: stronger bolts, reinforced frame, no visible weakness.
Arlo signed off the work order, stylus moving in a straight, steady line.
"Done," the tech said. "Camera's back to normal. System shows full lock confirmation."
"Good," Arlo answered. "Get the rig back to storage. If Jen asks, you tell her it went clean."
They rolled the cart away.
He stood alone in the corridor for a second longer, then turned his tablet so the screen was out of view of the camera and opened the maintenance console he'd quietly keyed to his login.
LOCK IRREGULARITY – CELL‑12‑CENTRAL: EVENT 001. DURATION: 0.8 SEC. SOURCE: CORR 12 BROWNOUT.
No alarms. No overrides. No angry messages from Jen.
Which meant one of two things:
Either the system really had shrugged it off as noise—
or Jen had seen it and chosen not to scream.
He knew his sister.
She didn't believe in giving people free passes.
"Okay," he murmured. "You felt that."
He adjusted the script.
No more lock checks piggybacked on corridor load shifts; that trick was spent. The next one would have to come from somewhere else—fire suppression, maybe, or a fake sensor failure in the camera grid that forced a soft reset on the door control.
Every new attempt was another footprint, another chance for Reed to get bored enough to dig.
And he still hadn't told the people in the cell that he was trying.
He slipped the tablet away.
For now, the crack existed. Tiny, risky, and watched by eyes he couldn't see—but real.
He walked on, because what came next had to look, to anyone watching, like business as usual.
The room settled back into its low, humming normal.
But Ariel kept hearing that tick, that tiny glitch in the lock, in the same place her mind kept replaying Arlo's voice. They started to blend together: hardware stutter and heart‑level break, both proof that what looked solid could fail.
Mara had resumed her position by the wall, but she wasn't just leaning anymore; she was counting under her breath, watching the vent, tracking the rhythm of the building like a doctor tracking a patient's pulse.
"Okay," she said finally. "Here's the math."
Chris looked up.
"Hit me," he said.
"Assuming that wasn't a one‑off, and the lock rechecks every time there's a local brownout or a specific kind of load shift, then we're sitting on a door that, under the right conditions, forgets how closed it is for less than a second."
Ariel frowned.
"What can you do with less than a second?" she asked.
Mara gave a humorless little smile.
"More than you'd think, if you're waiting for it," she said. "But we don't know what's actually happening inside the mechanism. Could be a simple status blip. Could be a physical unlock trying and failing. We need more data."
Chris's fingers tapped against his knee.
"How do we get it? It's not like we can ask someone to flip the switch again on purpose."
He didn't say Arlo.
He didn't have to.
Ariel's throat tightened.
"If that was him," she said slowly, "if he's…doing something with the building—"
"Rule one," Mara cut in gently. "We don't let hope drive the car. We treat this like a storm: we can't control who caused it, but we can decide what we do when the thunder hits."
She sank down to a crouch by the door again.
"If it happens again, I want one of you here with me," she said. "Hand flat on the metal, counting along. The other stays under the vent, listening. We triangulate: does the lock twitch when the vent does? Does the camera sweep pause?"
Ariel swallowed.
"I'll take the vent," she said.
Both Mara and Chris looked at her.
"You sure?" Chris asked. "You don't have to be the one closest to whatever he's messing with."
"That's exactly why I do," Ariel replied, more steel in her voice than she expected. "If he's playing with systems to…to get to us, I want to be the first to know how. I'm tired of finding out last."
Mara studied her for a long second, then nodded.
"Okay," she said. "Vent's yours. Door's mine. Chris, you're our translator. If we get even a hint that the lock actually moves, you remember the sound and feel and tell me exactly what kind of mechanism that is."
Chris huffed a breath.
"Finally," he said. "Homework I actually want."
He shifted so he could touch Ariel's ankle where it rested on the bench, a small, grounding contact.
"But I'm saying this once," he added, his voice dropping. "If he's behind this and it blows up, that's not on you. You don't carry his sins just because you're the one standing under his vent."
Ariel's eyes burned, but she blinked the heat back.
"Deal," she said quietly. "But if there's a way out hiding in his mess, I'm not leaving it unexplored just because he's the one who made it."
She tilted her head back, listening.
Somewhere, through layers of metal and concrete, she imagined she could hear a different heartbeat layered under the building's—fast, uneven, stubborn.
Arlo's, maybe.
She shoved the thought aside before it could soften anything.
Next time the cage hiccuped, she would be ready—not as a girl waiting to be saved by him, but as someone prepared to shove herself and the two people she'd chosen through any crack that opened, whether he stood on their side of it or not.
Jen found Arlo in the same operations office, the map still glowing faintly on the wall.
"You've been busy," she said, closing the door behind her.
Arlo didn't flinch.
"Maintenance," he replied. "You told me to make this floor worth the investment."
She walked closer, heels tapping, eyes skimming the updated notes: reinforced vent, localized brownout log, lock status resync.
"I also told you," she said, "that anything touching my new centerpiece cell is my business."
He watched her profile, searching for how much she'd seen.
"Then you've already read the report," he said. "Brownout, lock check, resync. System did exactly what it was designed to do."
Her mouth curved.
"Exactly?" she asked. "Funny thing, Reed spotted a hiccup. Less than a second where the door didn't know what it was."
She turned fully to him.
"You testing my infrastructure, little brother?" she asked lightly. "Or testing your…guests?"
He held her gaze.
"If that door fails under stress," he said, "you'll lose your doctor, your leverage, and your favorite toy all at once. I don't like surprises. I wanted to see how it behaved before a real problem hits."
Jen studied him for a long, silent beat.
Then she smiled.
"Good answer," she said. "Here's your reward."
She tapped a command into her tablet.
"Tomorrow, we move one of them," she said. "Ariel goes to another facility for a week. Different team. Different locks. If your redesign is as strong as you think, central block won't need her as a keystone."
Arlo's pulse spiked.
He kept his face neutral by force.
"Why move her?" he asked. "She's the reason they're compliant. You pull her out, Chris stops playing nice. Mara starts looking for sharper edges."
Jen's eyes glittered.
"That's the point," she said. "Reed thinks your people are too calm. He wants to see what happens when we tug the string."
She stepped closer, dropping her voice.
"And I want to see what you do when we move the only thing in that room you've ever looked at like she mattered more than your empire."
His jaw tightened before he could stop it.
Jen's smile widened by a hair.
"There it is," she murmured. "The flinch I was looking for."
She patted his cheek, just shy of the fading red mark Ariel's hand had left.
"Don't worry," she added. "We'll give you a chance to prove where your loyalty really sits. You'll personally escort her to the transfer point."
She turned away, already done.
"Make sure your shiny new lockup can handle a week without its favorite pressure point," she said over her shoulder. "If it can't, we'll know the redesign isn't the only thing that needs correcting."
The door clicked shut behind her.
Arlo stared at the map, the red X, the central cell icon.
Tomorrow.
His window had just been given an expiration date.
The news reaches the cell
They didn't hear about the transfer as an announcement.
They heard it in the change of footsteps.
For hours, the corridor outside had cycled through the same patterns: one guard every twenty minutes, a pair at shift change, the occasional heavier tread of someone higher‑ranked doing a pass.
You learned those rhythms when you lived in cages.
This time, three sets of boots stopped outside their door at once.
Mara straightened.
"Triple patrol," she said under her breath. "That's new."
Chris shifted closer to Ariel on the bench.
The small inspection hatch slid open with a metallic scrape. A guard's eyes peered in, then moved aside as someone else stepped up.
Reed's voice came through, muffled but unmistakable.
"Good evening, room service," he drawled. "Everybody sleeping okay in the Johnson Suite?"
Ariel's spine went rigid.
Mara moved automatically between the door and the bench.
"What do you want?" Chris snapped.
"Updates," Reed said cheerfully. "Experiments evolve, you know. We've decided the current configuration is too stable. So we're changing a variable."
Ariel's fingers dug into the edge of the bench.
"What variable?" she forced out.
"You," Reed said, with satisfaction. "Congratulations, sunshine. You've won an all‑expenses‑paid trip to a sister facility. New walls, new guards, new toys. These two will stay here and keep your seat warm."
The words hit like a physical blow.
Ariel felt the room tip.
"No," Chris said immediately. "She's not going anywhere with you."
Reed laughed.
"Oh, I love that you think you get a vote," he said. "Here's how this works: in twelve hours, our dear Arlo personally walks you to a transport. You get a week's vacation. If your brother and your favorite doctor behave while you're gone, maybe we send you back in one piece."
Mara took a slow breath, eyes dark.
"And if they don't?" she asked.
"Then I get to find out how they scream when they realize she's not coming back," Reed said lightly. "Either way, I win."
The hatch slammed shut.
Locks ground into place again, louder than before.
For a moment, the only sound in the cell was Ariel's breathing, too fast, shallow and sharp.
Chris turned to her.
"No," he said, voice raw. "We are not letting them move you again. Last time they took you, we almost—" He cut himself off, jaw shaking.
Mara's gaze went to the vent, then the door, then Ariel.
"Twelve hours," she said flatly. "That's our timer."
Ariel swallowed, throat tight.
"Move where?" she whispered. "Another chair? Another warehouse? Another set of hands that know all the places I break?"
Chris grabbed her shoulders, not rough, but firm.
"We are not letting them get that far," he said. "You hear me? I don't care what they threaten, or what Johnson thinks he's doing playing warden—"
"Or what he has to pretend to be to get close enough to the system to break it," Mara cut in quietly.
They both looked at her.
"I hate him right now," she said, not softening the word. "I hate every syllable he threw at you. But if they're making him escort you, that means he's going to be within arm's reach of the locks, the codes, the route."
Ariel's eyes burned.
"And you think that matters?" she asked. "After what he said? After what he did?"
"I think," Mara said carefully, "that if he was ever going to flip the table on them, doing it while they parade his biggest mistake down a hallway would be the moment."
She held Ariel's gaze.
"I am not asking you to trust him," she said. "I am asking you to decide whether you'd rather go into that transfer blind—or go into it prepared to break something if even half a crack opens."
Chris's hands tightened on Ariel's shoulders.
"I go where she goes," he said. "They want to move her, they move me too."
"That's not on the menu," Mara said. "Which means we have to cheat with the only tools we have: timing, anger, and the fact that Arlo Johnson just got backed into a corner."
Ariel closed her eyes for a second.
In the dark behind her lids, she saw two versions of the same man:
The one who had told her she smelled like antiseptic, who'd laughed about her body like it was a punchline—
and the one who had once driven like the city was an obstacle, not a place, because he was terrified of losing her.
Both were true.
Neither felt safe.
When she opened her eyes, they were wet, but steady.
"Fine," she said hoarsely. "Twelve hours. If there's a way to turn that walk into an exit, we try. But if he proves this is just another way to hurt us—"
"Then rule four stands," Mara said. "We choose us."
Ariel nodded.
"Then we get ready," she whispered.
Outside the door, the building's hum went on, indifferent.
Somewhere between the central cell and the operations office, Arlo Johnson walked the corridors with a clock in his head and a single, brutal fact settling like lead in his chest:
He had less than half a day to turn the cage he'd built into a doorway—
and the last chance to prove, to himself more than to anyone else, that the monster they saw was not the only thing he had left.
The change wasn't in the footsteps alone.
Ariel heard it first in the way the air shifted—more bodies, more gear, the clink of metal on belts. Then came the synchronized thud of boots, heavier than the usual patrol.
Mara was already on her feet.
"That's a full escort," she said tightly. "Three at least. Maybe more."
Chris moved in front of Ariel on instinct.
The locks began to disengage, each bolt sliding back with deliberate, unhurried weight. The door didn't just open; it announced itself, mechanical and smug, like it knew this wasn't a routine check.
When it swung inward, Arlo stood in the center of the doorway.
Two of Jen's men flanked him, rifles slung, batons at their hips. A third guard lingered behind, one hand resting near the stun cuffs clipped to his belt.
Arlo's expression was carved from stone.
"Smith," he said, eyes on Ariel. "On your feet."
The last time she'd seen him this close, her hand had been across his face and his words had been knives.
Now she felt her legs wanting to lock.
Chris stepped forward, blocking her.
"She's not going anywhere with you," he said. "You want to move someone, move me."
Arlo didn't glance at him.
"Orders are clear," he replied. "Ariel goes. You and the doctor stay. Don't make this harder than it needs to be."
Mara snorted once.
"Too late," she said.
The face‑off
Ariel pushed herself up, fingers briefly catching Chris's sleeve as she stood.
"Chris," she said quietly. "Let me."
His jaw worked.
"You don't have to walk out there with him," he said. "Not after—"
She cut him off with a small shake of her head.
"I'm not walking out there with him," she said. "I'm walking out there with my eyes open."
She turned to Arlo.
Her heart hammered so hard it made her hands tremble, but her voice came out steady.
"Look at me," she said.
For a fraction of a second, something flickered in his eyes—the same flash she'd seen once in a safe house, when she'd woken from a nightmare into his hands on her shoulders instead of Reed's on her throat.
He killed it fast.
His gaze was flat when it settled fully on her.
"You got something to say, make it quick," he said. "Clock's ticking."
"Just one thing," she replied. "If this is another way to break me, you should've picked someone else. I don't have anything left you're allowed to take."
The words landed like a quiet slap.
Nothing on Arlo's face moved.
Inside, the line of them cut.
Good, he told himself. Let her mean it.
Out loud, he only said, "Turn around."
The guard stepped in with cuffs.
Small resistances
Cold metal kissed Ariel's wrists as the restraints closed. They weren't zip ties this time but proper transport cuffs, linked just short enough to keep her steps small and her balance compromised if she tried to run.
Chris's hand brushed hers as the guard stepped back.
"Listen to me," he said, voice low, fierce. "If anything feels off on that walk—any glitch, any door that stutters—you take it. You don't wait for him, you don't ask permission. You move."
Arlo's jaw clenched.
"Done giving her instructions?" he asked.
Chris finally looked at him.
"I meant with or without you," he said. "If she gets even half a chance to run and you're standing in the way, I will find a way to hurt you from this cell."
Mara's eyes were on Arlo, not the guards.
"Last chance, Johnson," she said. "If you've got even one human decision left in you, don't waste this walk."
He met her stare.
"If I had any decisions," he said coolly, "we wouldn't be having this conversation in a cage."
He stepped back.
"Move."
The guards formed a small, efficient box around Ariel as she crossed the threshold—one at each side, one behind, Arlo in front. Classic high‑risk escort formation: prisoner contained, sightlines clear, weapons ready if she bolted.
The moment her foot hit the corridor, the world changed.
The cell's muffled acoustics gave way to the open echo of the long hallway. Cameras watched from the ceiling, little red lights blinking. Further down, a corner cut the line of sight, promising a temporary blind spot if anything went wrong—or right.
Behind her, Chris moved to the doorway, stopping just short of the threshold. The nearest guard outside lifted his rifle a fraction, warning.
"Don't," Arlo said without turning. "You cross that line, they put you on the floor."
Chris's hands curled around the doorframe instead, knuckles white.
"Ariel!" he called.
She twisted enough to see him over her shoulder.
He didn't give her a speech this time.
"Rule four," he said. "Remember."
She nodded once.
We choose us.
Then the door began to close.
For a second, she saw all three of them in the same frame—Chris braced in the doorway, Mara just behind him, eyes sharp, every muscle coiled as if she could memorize the pattern of their steps and turn it into a map later.
Then the metal shut, locks grinding home.
The sound was final in a way that made her stomach flip.
She turned back.
Arlo started walking.
The escort moved as one, boots thudding in a slow, lethal rhythm. Each camera they passed tracked them, lenses whirring softly.
"Eyes front," the guard behind her barked once, when he saw her trying to catch glimpses of door labels and exit signs.
Arlo didn't correct him.
He didn't say anything at all.
But when they reached the first intersection and the camera above it blinked in its regular sweep, Ariel saw his hand move—small, almost nothing.
He flexed his fingers twice at his side, timed with the camera's turn: one‑and‑two… sweep. one‑and‑two… sweep.
The exact rhythm Mara had been counting out loud in the cell.
It could have been coincidence.
It could have been nothing.
Ariel felt her heart slam against her ribs.
If it wasn't nothing, it was the first real signal she'd ever seen from him that wasn't made of pain or lies.
She didn't look at him.
She didn't speak.
She just filed the pattern away, like Mara had taught her, and walked toward whatever waited at the end of the corridor—
a van to another nightmare,
or the thin line of a chance she would have to be ready to take even if it meant trusting the last person she wanted to trust.