The air in the den was thick enough to taste, a stale cocktail of ozone, fear, and cold fury. The comforting chaos of their home had curdled into a war room's grim silence. Morgan's absence was a physical void, a cold spot in the room that sucked the warmth and the wisecracks right out of it.
Nezra stood before the main console, the flickering hologram of the Elysium club casting his face in shifting shades of blue and gold. His knuckles were white where they gripped the edge of the metal table. Scarlet's fingers were a blur over the keyboard, pulling up schematics, security rotations, energy flow maps—every byte of data they'd ever stolen on the impenetrable floating fortress.
"This is a suicide run," Rin stated, her voice flat as a stone. She wasn't arguing. She was just… cataloging the fact. "With all six of us, it was a seventy-thirty odds, and the thirty was us getting spaced. With three?" She let the question hang, a tombstone in the air.
"We don't have a choice," Rielle snarled, pacing like a specter. Her usual lethal grace was gone, replaced by a caged-panther tension. Every muscle was coiled, ready to spring at a ghost. "They have Morgan. They have her in that rust-bucket. We do the job, we get her back. It's the only play."
"It's a shit play," Kara murmured, her healer's hands nervously organizing and reorganizing a medkit that was already perfectly arranged. "We're walking into a den of wolves to borrow a steak so we can hopefully trade it to a pack of hyenas for our alpha. This is… this is biblical levels of fucked."
"Language," Scarlet muttered absently, her eyes glued to a line of code. Then she snorted a bitter laugh. "Who the hell am I kidding? She's right. This is a catastrophic clusterfuck waiting to happen."
Nezra finally looked up, his silver eyes cutting through the gloom. The new power humming under his skin, the Advanced-tier resonance, it didn't make him feel invincible. It made him feel the weight of every single variable, every potential point of failure, with terrifying clarity. He was the foundation now. And the foundation couldn't crack.
"We're not doing the job for them," he said, his voice low but absolute, silencing the room. "We're using the job to get to her. Scarlet and I will go to the Jacks' shithole. We'll negotiate. We'll threaten. We'll do whatever the hell we have to do to make sure they understand that if a single hair on Morgan's head is out of place, we will burn their entire world to the ground and piss on the ashes. Rin, Rielle, Kara." He turned to the three of them. "You're not just stealing a package. You're buying us leverage. You're proving we can hit Silas so hard he forgets his own name. That makes us more valuable to the Jacks than whatever shit deal they think they have."
He tapped the hologram, zooming in on the sleek, impossible structure of Elysium, floating like a jeweled dagger above the city's filth. "This is how we get her back. So let's stop bitching about the odds and start bending the fucking odds to our will."
The plan was laid out. It was insane. It was brilliant. It was their only hope.