Ferris walked back through the gate just after sunrise, two of her people flanking her, and the whole camp seemed to hold its breath at the sight of her.Ray met her halfway across the clearing, the note still crumpled tight in his fist."Explain this," he said. "Now.""I intended to," Ferris said calmly despite the fury written plain across his face. "Walk with me because this isn't a conversation for an audience."He followed her away from the nearest tents, every step tightening the knot already sitting in his chest."I didn't go to Wolfe," Ferris said, once they were clear of listening ears. "I went to the Rogues."Ray's stomach dropped. "That's supposed to make this better?""It's not the same thing, and you know it," Ferris said."Wolfe doesn't negotiate, he only conquers, or he ignores. The Rogues are different. They're businessmen wearing survival gear and I offered them a share of our supplies in exchange for leaving this camp alone.""You're paying traffickers," Ray announc

The lab corner of the camp had grown crowded with equipment over the weeks.It was salvaged with centrifuges and refrigeration units humming quietly beside Priya's growing collection of notes, anld by the third week she and Nichole had stopped sleeping on anything resembling a normal schedule."Run it again," Priya said, exhaustion thickness in her voice and watching Nichole insert another sample into the machine."We've run it eleven times," Nichole said, but he did it anyway, because eleven times hadn't been enough yet and both of them knew it.Training was carried on outside the tent walls the whole time, Mattias's drills growing sharper by the day.Saul was running fighters through increasingly difficult scenarios meant to prepare them for whatever waited inside Wolfe's territory. Ray split his time between both worlds, checking in on Priya's progress in the mornings and driving himself through drills in the afternoons, unwilling to let either front slip while the other demanded

Saul, Jane, and two of Mattias's most trusted fighters left before dawn, moving light and quiet toward the suspected base outside Kansas City.Ray spent the two days they were gone unable to settle into anything properly.They came back on the evening of the second day, dust-covered, exhausted, and carrying the kind of grim expressions that told Ray the news wasn't going to be simple."Talk to me," Ray said, the moment they were through the gate.******Jane laid the map out on the war table, marking positions as she spoke. "It's bigger than we thought, the perimeter's crawling with Zed replicas, not just one or two. We counted at least six, moving in coordinated patrols, same face, same voice, same everything.""Six of him," Mattias exclaimed with disbelief thick in his voice. "That's not a soldier anymore. That's an army wearing one man's skin.""There's more," Saul added. "Fifth stage inside, and they're not just standing guard. We watched a group of them through a gap in the fen

Ray came back to himself with blood in his mouth and Zed's boots already retreating through the smoke."Get up," he snarled at himself, forcing his body upright despite the ringing in his skull.The compound around him hadn't stopped burning. More replicas had pushed through from somewhere deeper in the base and at least four of them, and Mattias's flamethrower was running low, its flame sputtering thinner with every pass."Ray!" Jane screamed through the chaos. "We need you, now!"He forced himself forward, blade raised, control ability flaring weak but present.It staggered to the nearest replica just long enough for Mattias to finish it with the last real burst of fuel his tank had left."That's the tank empty," Mattias shouted, discarding the weapon."Then we finish it the old way," Ray shouted back, and threw himself at the next replica with everything exhaustion and fury could still give him.*******It took another brutal ten minutes to bring the last of them down, Ray, Jane,

The weeks after the compound blurred together into a rhythm Ray hadn't felt in longer than he could properly measure.He had healed, trained and pushed a little further each day than the day before.Saul ran him through drills every morning, patient but relentless, and Priya checked the wound in his side twice a day until it finally closed clean enough to stop worrying her."You're pushing too hard," she told him more than once."I've got a war to get back to," Ray always replied, and eventually she stopped arguing the point, just kept watching him closely instead.It was his control ability that came back strongest of all. Ray spent hours alone near the trees, reaching for that old, familiar thread, testing it against stray infected the scouts brought in for exactly this purpose. Where it had once felt thin and unreliable, scraping for every ounce of hold, it now came steady and full, a current he could shape instead of simply grab at."You've changed," Jane observed one evening, w