Kikaru did not answer Silas with another line.
She touched the switch at her collar, and the suit's active camouflage wrapped around her. Her outline vanished, but the cub did not. It flared once above her shoulder and poured golden light into her chest.
The light did not feel like fire. It felt like pressure from the inside, muscles waking in the wrong order and agreeing to work anyway.
Kikaru had trained her whole life to make movement clean. This was not clean. It was too much strength shoved into a body already running on anger and bad air. She accepted it anyway, because Colby was bleeding behind her and Silas still held the case.
Silas raised both hands.
Purple tendrils burst from the ground in front of him, slick and fast, snapping toward the empty space where Kikaru had been. She cut left. One tendril grazed her sleeve and peeled cloth from her arm. Another struck the dirt hard enough to dig a trench.
