Aiko started at fifteen-hundred.
The workshop on Level 5 was her domain — a cavernous space in the mansion's deepest subterranean level, converted by Aiko's engineering into a combination fabrication lab, armory, and bomb factory. The walls were lined with shelves of salvaged components: circuit boards stripped from dead electronics, copper wiring coiled in neat bundles, battery cells of varying sizes and charge levels, containers of pre-freeze chemicals that Aiko had identified, catalogued, and repurposed with the meticulous precision of someone who understood that in a frozen apocalypse, garbage was just raw material that hadn't found its purpose yet.
The workbench at the center of the room was six feet long, steel-topped, scarred with the marks of a thousand projects. It was covered now — organized chaos, the particular mess of an engineer in the middle of production. Spools of wire. Soldering iron. Multimeter. Circuit schematics printed on salvaged paper. A box of C4 plastic explosive, salvaged from a Philippine National Police armory in Taguig during the compound's early supply runs — twelve kilograms, sealed in military packaging, enough destructive potential to level a small building.
Aiko needed more than twelve kilograms.
"Mei,". — she, called, called
Mei's wheelchair appeared in the workshop doorway. She was holding her tablet, the screen displaying the compound's complete materials inventory — a master list that Mei maintained with the obsessive precision of a woman who treated resource management as a matter of life and death.
"We have four point three kilograms of RDX recovered from the PNP armory,". — Mei, reported, reported
Aiko did the math in her head. RDX, PETN, and C-4 — the holy trinity of military explosives, each one capable of turning a human body into a memory and a reinforced concrete wall into a suggestion. Combined with the existing C-4 stock, she had approximately twenty kilograms of explosive material.
Not enough. Not nearly enough.
"I need to synthesize more,". — she, said, said
Mei scrolled through the inventory. "Ammonium nitrate: eight kilograms, salvaged from an agricultural supply warehouse in Laguna. Nitromethane: one point two liters, from a hobby shop in Makati — it was used for model fuel, pre-freeze. Aluminum powder: four hundred grams, from the same hobby shop."
Aiko nodded. Ammonium nitrate and fuel oil — ANFO, the workhorse of improvised explosives, less powerful than C-4 but significantly easier to manufacture in volume. With the RDX and PETN acting as booster charges, she could create shaped charges that would punch through reinforced concrete and detonation sequences that would propagate through a building the size of a city block.
"How many charges are we making?". — Mei, asked, asked
"One hundred."
Mei looked up from her tablet. Her dark eyes were wide.
"One hundred," she repeated.
"One hundred C-4 charges. Compact. Detonation-controlled. Each one designed for maximum structural damage at its designated placement point." Aiko's voice was calm, practical, the voice of an engineer describing a mechanical problem and its solution. "The facility is approximately eight thousand square meters across six floors. One hundred charges, placed at strategic structural points — load-bearing columns, foundation joints, gas lines, HVAC main channels — will ensure complete structural collapse across all levels."
"One hundred charges," Mei said again. She was staring at Aiko with an expression that lived somewhere between awe and horror. "Aiko, do you understand how much explosive material that requires? Even with ANFO filling the low-priority charges and reserving the C-4 for the critical points, we're looking at—"
"I did the math already." Aiko pulled a sheet of paper from beneath the schematic — a hand-drawn table listing charge numbers, types, explosive weights, and placement coordinates. "Total explosive material required: forty-seven kilograms. Thirty-two kilograms of that will be ANFO — ammonium nitrate mixed with nitromethane as the fuel component, boosted with aluminum powder for increased brisance. The remaining fifteen kilograms will be divided between C-4 and RDX/PETN composite charges for the primary structural points."
"Forty-seven kilograms of explosive material." Mei's voice had gone quiet. "We have twenty kilograms in inventory. You're proposing to manufacture an additional twenty-seven kilograms of improvised explosive in the next—" She checked the timeline. "—eighteen hours."
"Yes."
"Aiko, that's not—"
"I've done it before." Aiko's voice was flat. Not defensive. Just factual. "In the Federation, before the freeze. I was the demolitions specialist for the Taichung forward operating base. I manufactured ANFO charges in volume for three months during the fortification project. I can do it in eight hours if the chemical stock is available and Mei stays out of my way."
"I'm not going to stay out of your way. I'm going to help you."
Aiko paused. Looked up. Mei's expression had shifted — the horror fading, replaced by the focused, determined look she got when data demanded action. Her dark eyes were sharp. Her fingers were already moving across the tablet, pulling up chemical safety protocols and synthesis procedures.
"The ammonium nitrate needs to be ground to a fine powder before mixing," Mei said. "I can handle the milling. I'll use the workshop's ball mill — the ceramic one, not the steel one. Steel spark hazard."
"Good. And the nitromethane needs to be heated to forty degrees Celsius before it'll mix properly with the ammonium nitrate. Use the portable heater from the medical bay — set it to low and monitor the temperature with the infrared thermometer. Nitromethane above sixty degrees becomes unstable."
"I know. I read the safety protocols."
"Then you know what happens if the mixture overheats."
"I know." Mei's voice was steady. "I also know what happens if we show up at that facility with twenty kilograms of explosive and discover we needed forty-seven. I'd rather spend eight hours making bombs than watch people die because we didn't bring enough firepower."
Aiko held her gaze for a moment. Then she nodded.
"Ball mill is in the supply cabinet, third shelf. Ceramic milling jar is in the crate labeled 'FRAGILE — GLASSWARE.' Safety goggles are on the peg by the door."
"I know where the safety goggles are." Mei wheeled herself to the supply cabinet. "I've been working in this shop longer than you."
"You've been watching me work in this shop longer than me. Different thing."
"Semantics." Mei pulled the ball mill from the shelf. "Start on the C-4 charges. I'll have the ANFO precursor ready in two hours."
They worked.
The workshop became a factory. Aiko at the workbench, her small hands moving with the mechanical precision of someone who'd assembled explosive charges hundreds of times — measuring, cutting, shaping, pressing the C-4 into compact blocks the size of a brick, each one weighing exactly three hundred grams, each one embedded with a detonator cap connected to a wired trigger circuit. The detonators were her design — salvaged blasting caps from the PNP armory stock, modified with copper wiring and micro-switches that could be triggered remotely via radio signal or manually via a coded input on the charge itself.
She worked in silence. No music. No conversation. Just the quiet, focused intensity of an engineer doing what she was trained to do, her mind entirely absorbed by the mathematics of destruction — charge weight, brisance index, detonation velocity, propagation delay, structural load calculations. Each charge was a problem to be solved, and Aiko solved problems the way other people breathed: constantly, automatically, with an efficiency that bordered on unconscious.
Mei worked beside her. The ball mill hummed in the corner, grinding ammonium nitrate to a fine powder — the first step in ANFO production, a process that required patience and precision in equal measure. The ceramic milling jar rotated slowly, the nitrate crystals breaking down under the impact of the ceramic grinding media, the powder getting finer with each passing minute. Mei monitored the temperature, the rotation speed, the particle size — every variable controlled, every measurement recorded on her tablet in real time.
Two hours in, the workshop smelled like chemicals and solder and the faint, acrid tang of nitrates. The air recyclers were running at maximum, pulling the volatile fumes out of the enclosed space and venting them through the mansion's exhaust system, but the smell lingered — a constant, low-level reminder that they were manufacturing the tools of destruction in a room that had once stored expensive wine.
Paolo appeared at the doorway at seventeen-thirty. He was carrying a tray of sandwiches and two bottles of water, his face pale, his eyes carefully fixed on the sandwiches and not on the workbench where Aiko was pressing C-4 into brick-shaped molds with her bare hands.
"Marie sent food,". — he, announced, announced
"Put it on the table by the door,". — Aiko, said, said
"I wasn't planning to touch anything. I was planning to stand here, put down the food, and leave very quickly without making any sudden movements." He set the tray down. His eyes betrayed him — they flicked to the workbench, to the neat rows of C-4 bricks already lined up like soldiers awaiting deployment, to the ball mill grinding ammonium nitrate in the corner, to the tangle of wires and detonator caps that sprawled across the table like a metallic vine. "How many is that so far?"
"Fourteen,". — Aiko, replied, replied
"Sixty-eight." Paolo swallowed. "Plus the thirty-two. That's—"
"One hundred."
"Right. One hundred." Paolo swallowed. "That's — okay, I know Jae-min once folded space to catch a bullet, but one hundred bombs is still one hundred bombs. That's a lot of bombs. That's a completely unreasonable number of bombs."
"It's the right number. The facility has one hundred and twelve identified structural weak points. One hundred charges covers the critical nodes with a twelve-point margin of error." She pressed another brick of C-4 into its mold, smoothed the surface with her thumb, and set it beside the others. "Each charge is designed to propagate into the next — Aiko's Cascade, I call it. Sequential detonation with point-three-second delay intervals. The shockwaves multiply. The structural integrity fails in order from bottom to top. The building doesn't explode outward — it implodes downward. The underground levels collapse into the foundation. The above-ground floors fold on top of them. The entire facility sinks into the ground like a—" She paused, searching for the right simile. "—like a tooth being pulled."
Paolo stared at her. "Did you just compare what you're building to dental extraction?"
"It's an accurate structural analogy."
"It's a terrifying structural analogy."
"Most accurate analogies are terrifying if you think about them long enough." Aiko looked up at him. Her dark eyes were calm, focused, completely devoid of the anxiety that Paolo was radiating like a heat source. "Paolo. Go back upstairs. Help Marie with dinner. Stop hovering in the doorway."
"I'm not hovering. I'm... strategically positioned."
"You're hovering. The sandwiches are on the table. Leave."
He left. The workshop returned to its rhythm — the hum of the ball mill, the quiet efficiency of Aiko's hands, the tap of Mei's fingers on her tablet. The C-4 bricks multiplied. Fourteen became eighteen. Eighteen became twenty-four.
At nineteen-hundred, Alessia appeared.
She was carrying a medical kit — a field trauma bag, pre-packed for the assault mission, containing everything she'd need to stabilize casualties in the field: tourniquets, hemostatic gauze, surgical scissors, IV lines, saline bags, epinephrine auto-injectors, and a portable defibrillator that Aiko had modified to run on salvaged battery cells.
"I need to talk to Aiko," she said. Her voice was calm but carried an edge — the particular edge of a doctor who was about to say something medical that the engineer wasn't going to want to hear.
"I'm busy,". — Aiko, replied, replied
"This won't take long." Alessia set the trauma bag on the table and walked to the workbench. She stopped directly in front of Aiko, her blue eyes fixed on the engineer's face with the clinical intensity of someone performing an assessment. "I need to confirm the detonation parameters. Specifically, the minimum safe distance for personnel during the cascade sequence."
Aiko's hands paused. She looked up at Alessia. "The minimum safe distance is two hundred meters. At that range, the blast overpressure will be below the threshold for pulmonary contusion. Closer than that, the shockwave can cause internal injuries even without direct fragmentation."
"Two hundred meters," Alessia repeated. "That's the minimum safe distance for the cascade sequence. What about the individual charges? The ones that might need to be triggered manually?"
Aiko's expression didn't change. But her hands — still resting on the half-formed C-4 brick — went very still.
"If a manual trigger is required, the operator would need to be within ten meters of the charge to input the code. The charge detonates eight seconds after the code is entered. That gives the operator eight seconds to reach minimum safe distance." She paused. "They won't reach minimum safe distance in eight seconds."
"No,". — Alessia, agreed, agreed
The workshop was quiet. The ball mill hummed. Mei's tablet screen glowed. And Aiko and Alessia looked at each other across the workbench — the engineer and the doctor, the builder and the healer, the woman who made things explode and the woman who put people back together afterward.
"Aiko," Alessia said quietly. "The manual trigger. If it's needed — if the remote system fails — the person who triggers it won't survive."
"I know."
"You know, and you still volunteered."
"Yes."
Alessia studied her face. The small, calm, focused face of a woman who was twenty-three years old and weighed forty-eight kilograms and was currently manufacturing one hundred explosive charges for an assault on a facility full of armed guards and human experimentation subjects. The face of someone who had done the math — the cold, brutal math of survival probability and mission parameters and the acceptable ratio of risk to reward — and had decided that the numbers added up.
"Is there any way to increase the delay?" Alessia pressed. "Twelve seconds? Fifteen? Give the operator more time to—"
"I could increase the delay to fifteen seconds. But it wouldn't matter." Aiko's voice was flat. "The cascade is timed from the first detonation. If I trigger the first charge manually, the cascade begins fifteen seconds later. If I'm still inside the building when the cascade starts—"
"You won't make it out."
"No." Aiko returned to the C-4 brick. Her hands resumed their work — measuring, pressing, smoothing — with the same mechanical precision as before. "I won't make it out."
Alessia stood there for a long moment. Her blue eyes were bright. Her jaw was tight. The clinical mask was holding, but just barely — the fractures were visible around the edges, hairline cracks where the doctor's compassion was trying to break through the soldier's pragmatism.
"Aiko," she said. "Is there anything I can—"
"No. Thank you. Go prepare your medical kit. I have work to do."
Alessia nodded. She turned and walked to the door, her footsteps sharp and precise on the concrete floor. She paused at the threshold.
"If it comes to the manual trigger,". — she, said, said
Aiko didn't look up. Her hands didn't stop.
"I know,". — she, said, said
Alessia left.
The workshop returned to its rhythm. The ball mill ground. The C-4 bricks multiplied. Twenty-four became twenty-eight. Twenty-eight became thirty-two. The primary structural charges were complete — thirty-two compact blocks of military-grade plastic explosive, each one embedded with a detonator cap, each one connected to a trigger circuit, each one designed to receive a radio signal from Mei's remote detonation system or a manual code input from someone standing ten meters away with eight seconds to live.
Mei finished the ANFO precursor at twenty-one-hundred. The ammonium nitrate powder was fine — finer than flour, the particles small enough to mix evenly with the nitromethane fuel component. She transferred the powder to a mixing container — a salvaged stainless-steel pot that had once been used to cook pasta in the mansion's kitchen and now served a very different purpose — and began the careful process of combining the oxidizer and the fuel.
The mixture was simple. Ammonium nitrate and nitromethane, combined in a six-to-one ratio by weight, with aluminum powder added as a sensitizer to increase the brisance — the shattering power — of the resulting explosive. The mixing had to be done by hand, slowly, with a wooden paddle that wouldn't generate sparks. Too fast, and the mixture could overheat. Too slow, and the nitrate and fuel wouldn't bond properly. Mei moved the paddle in slow, deliberate circles, her dark eyes fixed on the mixture, her tablet recording the temperature every thirty seconds.
Forty-one degrees. Forty-two. Forty-three.
"Steady," Aiko murmured from the workbench. She was working on the ANFO molds now — larger than the C-4 bricks, each one designed to hold a kilogram of improvised explosive. The molds were made from salvaged PVC pipe, cut to length and capped at both ends, with a pre-drilled hole in the side for the detonator insertion. "Keep it under forty-five. If the nitromethane gets too hot, the mixture becomes friction-sensitive."
"I know,". — Mei, said, said
Forty-four. Forty-four point five. Forty-four point eight.
She pulled the paddle out. Set it down. The mixture was done — a grayish paste with the consistency of wet sand, smelling faintly of chemicals and something sharper, something that lived in the space between ammonia and acid. It didn't look like much. Aiko knew better. A kilogram of ANFO, properly mixed and detonated, would crater a reinforced concrete floor.
Mei transferred the mixture to the PVC molds. Aiko inserted the detonator caps. Wires connected. Circuits closed. One charge done.
They worked through the night.
The compound slept around them — or tried to. The sound of the workshop filtered through the floors: the hum of the ball mill, the scrape of the paddle against stainless steel, the quiet conversation between two engineers who were building the instruments of destruction with the same focus and care that other people applied to music or art or cooking.
Jae-min checked on them at midnight. He stood in the doorway, watching, saying nothing. Aiko was on her forty-seventh charge — halfway through the ANFO composite. Mei was mixing another batch of precursor, her face pale but focused, her movements precise despite the hours of repetitive labor. The workshop was warm — the chemical reactions and the ball mill and the body heat of two people working at maximum output had raised the temperature to nearly thirty degrees — and both of them had stripped down to tank tops, their skin gleaming with sweat.
"How many?". — Jae-min, asked, asked
"Forty-seven complete,". — Aiko, reported, reported
"You need to sleep."
"I'll sleep after."
"Aiko—"
"I'll sleep after." Her voice was flat. Final. The voice of someone who had made a calculation and was not interested in revisiting it. "I need to finish the charges, test the detonation circuits, and verify the cascade timing. That takes eight more hours. Sleep can wait."
He didn't argue. He knew better. Aiko was the kind of person who worked until the work was done, and no amount of maternal concern — which was not, he reminded himself, a role he was suited for — was going to change that.
He left. He went to the rooftop instead, where the relay antenna was still pointing its white parabolic eye at the Pasig complex four kilometers away, and he stood in the minus seventy-two degree wind and stared east and felt the frozen city stretching out before him like a wound that wouldn't heal. The snow canyons between buildings glowed faintly in the darkness — walls of hard-packed frozen snow dense as concrete rising ten meters on either side of the tunnel exits, their surfaces blue-white and crystalline where the cold had fused layer upon layer into something harder than stone. The skyline beyond was a jagged silhouette of half-buried towers, only their rooftops breaking the white plain like broken teeth, their dark windows reflecting nothing. The tunnel entrance to the east was visible from here — a rectangle of black against the white, reinforced with salvaged steel, the path the strike team would take tomorrow morning. Four kilometers through frozen hell. Jae-min traced the route with his eyes and counted the danger points. Twelve. He'd counted them before. The number hadn't changed.
At oh-two-hundred, Mei's wheelchair was empty.
Aiko found her in the corner of the workshop, slumped against the wall, her head tilted to the side, her tablet sliding from her lap. She'd fallen asleep mid-task — the mixing paddle still in her hand, the chemical analysis screen still glowing on the tablet, the ball mill still humming in the corner because neither of them had remembered to turn it off.
Aiko set down her tools. Crossed the workshop. Gently, carefully, she lifted the tablet from Mei's lap and placed it on the shelf. Then she draped a thermal blanket over Mei's shoulders — the same blanket she used when working late in the workshop, salvaged from a frozen department store in BGC, warm enough to keep a sleeping woman comfortable in a room that was thirty degrees and getting warmer.
She stayed up as long as I did, — Aiko thought, quiet appreciation threading through the exhaustion, the unexpected warmth of someone choosing to stay when she didn't have to). She didn't have to. She's not a combatant. She's not a demolitions specialist. She just... stayed.
Aiko returned to the workbench. The ball mill hummed. The charges multiplied. Fifty-three remaining became forty-eight. Forty-eight became forty-two. Forty-two became thirty-five.
At oh-three-thirty, Aiko heard footsteps in the corridor. Light, quick, precise — the gait of someone who moved through the world with intention and efficiency.
Yue appeared in the doorway.
She was dressed differently than usual. Gone were the casual clothes she wore around the compound — the dark pants, the loose shirts, the comfortable layers that made underground life bearable. Instead, she was wearing tactical gear: black cargo pants, fitted thermal undershirt, combat boots with reinforced soles. Her black hair was pulled into a tight, high ponytail that left her neck exposed and her marble eyes unobstructed. Her hands were bare, her fingers extended, her stance balanced and ready.
She was dressed to kill.
"Jae-min told me you'd be here,". — she, said, said
"Ask."
"The charges. The one hundred charges. How many do you need to bring down the entire facility?"
"All of them. The cascade is designed as a complete system — every charge is a node in the propagation sequence. Removing any charge creates a gap in the chain that could result in partial collapse instead of total structural failure."
"How long does the cascade take, from first detonation to complete collapse?"
Aiko calculated. "The full cascade — from the first charge to the final structural failure — takes approximately four point seven seconds. The initial detonation triggers a sequential chain with point-three-second intervals between each charge. The shockwaves propagate, multiply, and compound. By four point seven seconds, the entire facility has lost structural integrity."
"Four point seven seconds." Yue absorbed the number. "And the manual trigger?"
"Eight seconds from input to detonation. Fifteen seconds if I extend the delay."
"If someone is inside when the cascade starts, how long do they have to reach the exit before the building comes down?"
Aiko looked at her. The question was tactical, professional, the kind of question a combat specialist would ask before committing to an operation. But Aiko could see something behind Yue's marble eyes — not fear, not hesitation, but the cold, precise calculation of someone who was already measuring the distance between the underground laboratories and the nearest exit and comparing it to four point seven seconds and understanding that the numbers didn't work.
"It depends on where they are," Aiko said carefully. "Sub-Level Two — the Observation Ward — is approximately forty meters from the loading dock exit. At a sprint, that's five to six seconds. If the cascade starts while they're on Sub-Level Two, they have a chance. Sub-Level One — the laboratories — is closer to the loading dock, maybe twenty-five meters. Three to four seconds at a sprint. Tight, but possible."
"And if they're deeper in the facility? If they're in the laboratories when something goes wrong and they have to get to the exit before the building comes down?"
Aiko didn't answer immediately. She knew what Yue was asking. She knew because she'd done the same calculation herself, had run the same numbers, had arrived at the same conclusion: that the underground levels of the APB facility were a death trap for anyone caught inside when the cascade started, and that the people most likely to be caught inside were the ones who were going in to rescue the subjects.
"If we trigger the cascade and someone is still in the underground levels,". — Aiko, said, said
Yue nodded. The information settled into her mind with the weight of a known quantity — filed, categorized, added to the calculation she was running behind her marble eyes. She didn't react. She didn't flinch. She just absorbed the data and moved on, the way she did everything, the way she'd trained herself to process information without letting the emotional content slow her down.
"Thank you,". — she, said, said
She turned to leave. At the doorway, she stopped.
"Aiko."
"Yes?"
"The charges. The one hundred charges." Yue's voice was flat. The flattest sound Aiko had heard in weeks. "If we can't save them — if the subjects are too far gone, if the guards are too many, if the mission fails — you detonate all of them. All one hundred. Understand?"
"I understand."
"I'm not asking you to bring the building down around our own people. I'm asking you to make sure that whoever did this can never do it again. The facility. The equipment. The records. The guards. Everything." Her marble eyes found Aiko's. "If we can't save them, we bury the evidence. And everyone who made it."
She's not talking about the subjects. — Aiko thought, cold realization settling into her chest, understanding for the first time the full scope of what Yue was asking — not a demolition order but an execution sentence for everyone inside that building). She's talking about the guards. She's talking about the people who strapped her students to tables and pumped glowing fluid into their veins and used women in rooms with cameras on the ceiling. She wants them dead. Not captured. Not stopped. Dead. Buried. Erased.
"I understand," Aiko repeated. Her voice was steady. "All one hundred charges. Complete cascade. No survivors in the blast zone."
Yue held her gaze for a moment longer. Then she nodded, turned, and walked into the dark corridor, her combat boots silent on the concrete, her marble eyes fixed forward, her body carrying the particular stillness of a woman who had just given the order to bury her enemies and was already moving on to the next item on her agenda.
Aiko returned to the charges.
Thirty-five remaining became twenty-eight. Twenty-eight became twenty. Twenty became twelve. Twelve became six. Six became three. Three became two. Two became one.
The last charge was completed at oh-four-fifteen.
Aiko set it down beside the others — one hundred compact blocks of explosive, arranged in neat rows on the workbench, each one labeled with a number and a placement coordinate, each one connected to a detonator cap, each one ready to receive the radio signal that would start the cascade or the manual code that would end everything.
One hundred charges.
Enough to bring down a building the size of a city block.
Enough to bury the evidence.
Enough to make sure that what happened in the Pasig facility stayed in the Pasig facility, entombed beneath a hundred thousand tons of concrete and steel and frozen earth, sealed forever beneath the ice that had already buried the rest of the world.
Aiko sat back. Her hands were trembling — not from cold, not from fear, but from exhaustion, the deep, bone-level fatigue of twelve hours of precision work with volatile materials. Her fingers were stained with C-4 residue — a faint, oily sheen that smelled like plastic and chemicals and nothing good. Her eyes burned. Her back ached. Her tank top was soaked with sweat.
She looked at the one hundred charges on the workbench. Neat. Organized. Ready.
If we can't save them, we bury the evidence. — Aiko thought, exhaustion and determination mixing in her chest like two chemicals that shouldn't combine but did, producing something harder than either alone). And everyone who made it.
She stood. Walked to the corner where Mei was sleeping. Knelt beside her. Gently, she touched Mei's shoulder.
"Mei. Wake up."
Mei's eyes opened. She blinked. Looked at Aiko. Looked at the workbench. Looked at the one hundred charges lined up in their neat, terrible rows.
"Done?". — she, whispered, whispered
"Done."
Mei was quiet for a moment. Then she reached up and squeezed Aiko's hand — brief, firm, the grip of someone who understood what had just been built and what it would be used for and what it would cost.
"Go sleep,". — Mei, said, said
"I need to verify the cascade timing—"
"Go. Sleep. Two hours. I'll test the circuits and wake you if anything's wrong."
Aiko wanted to argue. She wanted to stay, to check, to verify, to make sure every connection was secure and every circuit was live and every detonator was primed. But her body was failing her — the exhaustion was winning, the sleep debt was collecting, and the workshop was spinning very slowly around her like a lazy carousel.
"Two hours,". — she, agreed, agreed
She lay down on the workshop floor. The concrete was warm. The C-4 charges glowed faintly in the dim light — not from the explosive itself, but from the detonator indicators, small LED diodes that blinked green to confirm circuit connectivity. One hundred green lights, blinking in unison, a constellation of destruction arranged on a steel workbench in a basement that had once stored expensive wine.
She closed her eyes.
The workshop hummed.
And four kilometers to the east, in a frozen building on the banks of the Pasig River, a machine broadcast its dying cry into the silence, and the countdown continued, and the clock was running, and one hundred charges sat on a workbench waiting for someone to carry them into the dark.