Chapter 87: The Fracture
The silence in the warehouse was a physical thing.
It was heavy.
It was cold.
And it was broken.
The holographic image of Captain Valerius vanished, but her presence lingered, a ghost of a promise and a threat that had just driven a wedge deep into the fragile heart of their team.
Jax was the first to move, hobbling back to his workshop with a quiet, uncharacteristic slowness, the usual manic spark gone from his eyes.
Chloe stood at her console, her back to the room, her posture a rigid, unyielding line of pure, analytical focus. She was already processing the new intel, her mind a fortress of cold, hard logic.
But Jinx... Jinx was a storm.
She stood in the center of the room, her body a coiled spring of pure, undiluted, and righteous fury.
She didn’t look at Michael.
She couldn’t.
"So that’s it, then," she said, her voice a low, dangerous growl that was more terrifying than any shout.
"We just... trust her."
"We just walk hand-in-hand with the same people who have been trying to put a bullet in our heads since day one."
She finally turned, and her electric-blue eyes were blazing with a pain so raw, so profound, that it almost made him flinch.
"You don’t get it, do you, kid?" she spat, the words a venomous hiss.
"You weren’t there. You didn’t see what they do."
"They don’t just kill you. They erase you. They smile, they make promises, they use you up, and then they wipe the slate clean like you were never even there."
Her voice cracked, just for a second, a single, sharp note of a grief that was still bleeding.
"The last time I trusted a DGC contact," she whispered, her voice a raw, ragged thing, "I watched my family get torn apart and then sanitized from a goddamn incident report."
"And you just invited them to our front door."
"I’m sorry, Jinx," Michael said, his own voice quiet, heavy with a weight he didn’t know how to carry. "I am."
"But what other choice did we have?" he asked, his voice rising, a note of desperation creeping in. "Sit here? Wait for Kael and his new-and-improved ghost dogs to track us down and pick us off one by one?"
"They have the intel we need, Jinx. They know where to find the Alkahest."
He took a step towards her, his own desperation making him bold.
"This isn’t just about the mission anymore. This is about me."
He gestured vaguely at his own head, at the storm that was constantly raging just behind his eyes.
"I need that cure," he said, the words a quiet, terrified confession. "Before the thing inside me... before it wins."
"And what if the cure is a lie?" she shot back, her voice a raw, desperate plea. "What if this is just another trap? Another setup? They dangle this magic potion in front of you, lead you into a kill box, and then it’s over."
"They get their weapon," she finished, her gaze a physical blow, "and the rest of us get erased."
The air crackled between them, a chasm of trauma and fear that was too wide to cross.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa."
The voice was Jax’s. He had hobbled back out of his workshop, leaning heavily on his crutch, his face a mask of genuine, un-ironic concern.
"Easy there, Mama Bear, Papa Spooky," he said, his voice a gentle, disarming buffer in their cold war.
"Can we maybe not have the big, dramatic, ’team-is-falling-apart’ fight right now?" he asked, a pleading look on his face. "My leg hurts, and all this emotional turmoil is really not helping with the phantom-limb-pain thing."
He looked from Jinx’s furious, wounded face to Michael’s desperate, haunted one.
"We’re all on the same dysfunctional team, remember?" he said quietly. "We’re a set."
His simple, ridiculous words were a splash of cold water.
The tension didn’t vanish, but it subsided, the roaring fire of their argument banking into a low, smoldering coal.
Chloe’s voice cut through the heavy silence, a sharp, clean line of pure, tactical focus.
"The intel from Valerius has been cross-referenced and confirmed," she announced, not looking up from her console.
A new, terrifyingly detailed blueprint flickered to life on the holographic table.
"Black Site Omega."
"It’s a decommissioned DGC research and containment facility, located in the heart of the Zone," she explained, her voice all business, pulling them all back to the mission.
"The what?" Jax asked.
"The Bronx Quarantine Zone," Jinx translated, her voice a low, grim murmur. She was still angry, but the professional in her was taking over. "A ten-block radius that was walled off after the ’05 Cataclysm Gate. They say the air in there is poison and the ground is... hungry."
"It’s a dead zone," she finished, a new, dark understanding dawning in her eyes. "No power grid. No comms. No surveillance. The DGC can’t see what goes on in there."
"Which makes it the perfect place for them to hide their dirty secrets," Michael finished.
"And the perfect place for us to conduct an off-the-books operation," Chloe confirmed.
She zoomed in on the blueprint, a complex, multi-layered schematic of a subterranean fortress.
"The facility is old," she explained. "Pre-Gate. Its security systems are primarily analog. Physical locks. Reinforced walls. Pressure plates."
"My hacking abilities will be of limited use," she stated, a rare admission of a weakness.
"This will be a physical infiltration. Boots on the ground."
Michael stared at the blueprint, his [Void Sense] a low, constant thrum in his mind.
He could feel the cold, dormant energy of the place. The ghosts of old, forgotten technologies.
But he could also feel something else.
A deep, dark, and profoundly wrong energy, radiating from the lowest levels of the facility.
It wasn’t a machine.
It wasn’t a person.
It was a cage.
A very large, very old, and very, very full cage.
He was so focused on the feeling that he didn’t notice Chloe watching him.
"Michael," she said, her voice quiet, pulling him back. "What do you feel?"
"It’s not just a lab," he whispered, his own voice sounding distant to his ears.