Emma wasted no time. She dropped to her knees beside Aya and pressed two fingers to her neck.
"She's still breathing." Emma's voice was measured, controlled. "But her pulse is weak. John needs to be quick."
She leaned closer. "Aya — can you hear me?"
Silence. Aya was completely unconscious.
"Put her fucking guts back in!" Milo shouted
.
Emma shook her head sharply. "No. That'll make it worse." She looked up at the nearest Maggot. "Help me lay her on her back — slowly. Gently."
Together, they shifted Aya's body with careful hands until she lay flat against the ground.
"Now what?" Diego asked.
"Someone get me a clean cloth. Now."
Benjamin was already moving. He tore through the stolen assets, rifling until he found five sheets of gauze, and brought them straight to Emma.
She took them without a word. She moistened the gauze with clean water, then carefully — deliberately — laid it across Aya's exposed intestines.
"This keeps the organs from drying out, reduces contamination, and preserves the tissue." Emma explained without looking up.
Everyone around her nodded, absorbing her words, each of them looking for something useful to do. Hannah was conspicuously nowhere to be found.
"What else?" Mitch asked.
"We need to control the bleeding. Apply pressure around the wound — not on the intestines. Compress gently."
Mitch watched her work for a moment. "You're eerily calm for a situation like this," he said, almost amused.
"Calm?" She let out a short laugh. "You think I'm calm? My heart's beating out of my chest, idiot."
Aya's eyelids stirred. They lifted slowly, her gaze drifting in confusion before it fell — and she saw it. Everything. Her own intestines, exposed and glistening beneath the gauze.
"Don't look," Emma said immediately, firmly but soft. "Don't panic. You're going to be fine. We're all here, and we're making sure you don't die."
Aya gave a frantic nod, her breathing shallow and rapid. Her eyelids were already growing heavy.
Emma checked her pulse again. It was weaker than before. "Hurry up, John..."
"Stay with us, Aya," Milo said, positioning himself to block her view. "Keep your eyes open."
"Am I... going to die...?" Aya breathed.
Milo faltered. "That's a stupid thing to say." His voice cracked slightly. "No one here is going to leave you. You'll be just fine."
Aya managed a weak smile. "Are you... crying?"
He smiled back. "Maybe."
---
From the adjacent room, Conrad stood watching them — jaw set, eyes hard and calculating. Then Duncan's hand closed around his arm.
"What are you going to do?" Duncan asked quietly.
"What do you think?" Conrad pulled his arm free. "I'm going to kill them. John isn't here to protect them."
"If you kill them, John will kill us!"
"Idiot." Conrad's voice dropped to something cold and deliberate. "Once they're dead, we leave with the assets. John has almost no chance of successfully stealing the Vivex — and even if he does, he won't make it back in time to catch us."
Duncan grabbed his shoulder and yanked him back hard. "No. Listen to me. It just seems... wrong."
Conrad stared at him. "Wrong?"
"Look at them." Duncan's voice tightened. "They're suffering. They're helpless. And I'm looking at them and I'm realizing — they're no different from us."
"You feel sorry for these maggots?" Conrad's lip curled in contempt. "You really are as pathetic as I always thought you were."
"They suffer. They feel joy, sadness, anger — the same things we do." Duncan pressed on, even as the words seemed to cost him. "Only now am I seeing it clearly. And right now, they're completely helpless."
"They were helpless the moment John left," Conrad said. "And they are not the same as us. You don't know what you're saying. We are a superior being."
"I know exactly what I'm saying. I'm not siding with them — it just seems wrong to kill them while they're in a situation like this."
"Their existence," Conrad said quietly, "was already wrong to begin with."
Duncan exhaled. "You say we're superior because we're physically stronger. Is that it?"
Conrad said nothing.
"Then if they took V — would we suddenly be the same? And if that's really how you see the world, then your own son — if you had one — would be just as pathetic as these people. Wouldn't he?"
"That's not how it works!" Conrad snapped. "These people are beneath us. They're poor, filthy, and disgusting!"
"Because we—" Duncan stopped. The words were almost too difficult to say. "Because we never give them a chance."
He pushed through it. "I was raised being told these people were futile. Insignificant. Worthless. But the more I actually know them, the more I see — we're not different from them at all."
"You're getting your mind twisted!" Conrad's voice rose. "They're not worthless — they're a threat, because they have powerful allies! Before John and Hannah arrived, they were nothing!"
"You're not a threat to Sovereign," Duncan said steadily. "Does that make you worthless? There are billions of people on this planet, and you know fewer than a hundred of them. Does that make all the rest worthless?"
Ethan stood frozen, watching them. He had no idea what to say or do.
Conrad's expression darkened. He moved without warning — his hand snapping around Duncan's throat.
"What the fuck do you think you're doing?" Duncan wheezed.
Conrad tightened his grip. "What I should have done a long time ago."
Then Hannah suddenly shoved Conrad into a wall.
He laughed as he pushed off the floor and surged back upright, grabbing a fistful of her hair. "I wanted to kill you all together."
Hannah punched him in the gut and cracked a right hook across his jaw. Conrad touched his lip, looked at the blood on his fingertip, and stared at her with genuine confusion. "How did you do that? What did you do?"
Hannah smiled. "A little enhancement."
She hit him again — face, then an uppercut. Conrad slipped the uppercut and countered with a precise chop to her neck, then drove a punch into her chest and hurled her into the wall.
Hannah was back on her feet in an instant.
She drove her knee into his face and snapped an uppercut into his chin, then buried her fist into his solar plexus — rear hook — another brutal uppercut.
Conrad's head rang. He looked past her at Ethan and Duncan. "What the fuck are you two doing?! Kill her!"
Duncan stood still. Silent. Unmoved.
Ethan looked between them, pale and uncertain.
"Ethan." Conrad's voice turned to ice. "If you don't help me, I will break your fucking jaw."
Ethan flinched. He stood, and before he could make the choice, his body was already moving. He struck Hannah from behind.
He glanced once at Duncan — a brief, conflicted look — and then threw his weight behind Conrad.
Hannah pivoted and broke Ethan's nose with a clean shot, then hoisted him up and threw him into the wall. Conrad seized the opening.
He dropped into a devastating dropkick that hit Hannah squarely in the back — brutal, precise, and impossibly powerful. The force launched her through the wall entirely.
She hit the ground on the other side screaming, clutching her back, rolling in agony.
"HANNAH!!" Benjamin's voice tore through the base the moment he heard it.
Duncan's breath came in ragged bursts, his mind cycling frantically between choices he couldn't make.
Benjamin geared up instantly and charged toward Conrad. But the machine wasn't built for this — wasn't built for an executive.
Conrad threw one punch and the suit shattered. Benjamin's head cracked against the wall.
Conrad walked over and closed his hand around Benjamin's skull. "I'll start with you."
The neuro-disruptive blast caught him square in his back — Milo's shot, clean and precise.
Alfie Sr. followed immediately, slamming the electric baton into Conrad's chest with everything he had.
Conrad screamed — his muscles seized, locked rigid against his will, every fiber unable to release.
Benjamin drove the armored sleeve onto his right arm and began to work. The first blows barely registered. But Conrad's face began to open up, and the blood came.
On the other side of the room, Ethan stirred back to consciousness — and found Milo standing over him in one of the suits, pinning him flat.
"Your friend Duncan already bolted," Milo said, grinning down at him. "No idea where the prick ran off to, but he won't find a way out of here. You're completely alone, mate."
---
BEFORE ALL OF THIS.
John exploded out of the base and tore through the tunnels at hypersonic speed. The walls cracked in his wake, the concussive force deafening anyone unfortunate enough to be somewhere inside the sewers.
Within seconds, he reached the manhole cover. He slid it open quietly and pulled himself up into the open air. Moonlight spilled across the street in long, pale sheets.
A man walking nearby stopped dead in his tracks the moment he spotted John emerging from the sewer. They both froze in an absurd beat of mutual stillness — then the man smiled, slow and cruel, sizing John up as just another poor wandering alone in the dark.
He charged.
John hit him once and left him unconscious on the ground.
"Sorry," he whispered.
He stood over the man for a moment — then paused. An idea.
He pulled on the man's clothes, slid his sunglasses on, and tugged his hoodie up over his face. Then he walked straight into HEX.
He moved swiftly through the building, rode the elevator down, and stepped into the lab. He swept the room until he found it.
"There it is." He exhaled. "Vivex."
He grabbed five doses and stuffed them into the hoodie's pocket, then stepped back into the elevator. When the doors opened at the ground floor, three men were already waiting.
"You're not getting away this time." The first one clenched his fist and lunged.
John flew into all three of them. Their bodies launched backward and crashed through the glass walls with a thunderous impact.
The sound rolled through the building, and heads turned. Employees froze where they stood.
John didn't stop. He was already gone, booming out through the entrance.
One employee stared at the aftermath, stunned. "He's too fast..."
Then — John hit something solid. Something that didn't give at all. He fell, skidding against the ground, rubbing his forehead. A massive shadow fell across him.
He looked up slowly.
Sovereign.
"Oh, fuck..."
John snatched up the dropped doses and wrenched himself into the air — but Sovereign's hand closed around his leg in an instant and drove him back into the ground with crushing force.
"I was expecting you, John Harper." Sovereign's voice carried a weight that seemed to press against the air itself.
John ground his teeth. "What do you want?"
"I want my assets returned."
"And if I don't?"
Sovereign descended slowly to the ground. "I know you're not taking that for yourself."
"Sure I am."
He smiled faintly. "Let me guess. Someone you care about is dying. That's why you've been so frantic."
"No. I'm trying to get away from you and your people."
"You know you can't lie to me," Sovereign said, almost gently. "So why try?"
John's jaw tightened.
"Give me my assets, and I will let you walk away today." Sovereign offered it like it was simple. "That's all."
"How do I know I can trust that?"
Sovereign's hand moved — and the Vivex was gone from John's grip before his mind could even register the motion.
"Go and get it. Now."
John held very still. "If I don't — will you kill me?"
"Yes. Of course."
John laughed. It wasn't defiant. It was almost easy. "No you won't. I'm the only one who knows where those assets are. Right now, I'm just as valuable to you as they are."
"You're right," Sovereign said without hesitation. "You are. But I am not threatening your life, John. I'm threatening the lives of the people you love."
John didn't want to hand it back. He didn't believe Sovereign would actually let him walk. And then Nixon's voice surfaced in his memory, unbidden: "We're being treated like puppets, Knox. And I hate it. It makes us feel small — reduces us from humans into toys."
"Don't you want to have a little fun?" John broke the silence.
Sovereign tilted his head. "Meaning?"
"You like to play with your food. So let me go — and I'll show you that you've been underestimating me."
Sovereign chuckled, "How did you arrive at that conclusion?"
"I can feel it." John didn't move. "You can't lie to me, either."
Sovereign was quiet for a long moment — and then he laughed. A full, genuine laugh that carried something almost like delight.
"Every day," he said, "you find a new way to impress me."
He exhaled slowly. "I suppose there's no point concealing it anymore." He extended the Vivex back toward John. "Here's what we'll do. You run. My soldiers will give chase. Be careful, though — leave too many traces and you'll lead them straight back to your friends."
He released the doses.
The next sound was a sonic boom and an empty street.
---
"FUCK!" Emma's composure finally fractured. "At this point, she has minutes — maybe less!"
"What else can we do?!" Alfie Jr. demanded.
Emma pressed her hands against her head. "There is nothing else. I've done everything I can!"
"AAARGH!!"
Conrad tore free from the baton's grip with a roar. He spat — blood, and a single shattered tooth. Alfie Sr. came at him again, but Conrad caught the baton by its handle and crushed it.
"I'm going to rip your fucking heads off," he snarled, "and keep them in my room as trophies."
Then a sonic boom shook the entire room and threw Conrad off balance, stealing the words from his mouth.
"We're fucked," he said, and for the first time, he sounded like he meant it.
John burst through the entrance and moved. He didn't look at Conrad — not yet. He crossed the room in a blur, dropping to his knees beside Aya.
"Thank God you're here," Mitch breathed.
Emma drove the Vivex into Aya's arm. Nothing happened.
"What the FUCK?" John's voice broke open. "Why isn't it working?!"
Across the room, Conrad tried to launch himself into the air — but Milo's shot connected before he cleared the ground, and he crashed back down.
John was on him before he landed. The distance between them collapsed in an instant, and John's fist connected with Conrad's face hard enough to shatter teeth.
"Guys...?"
John stopped.
He turned.
Aya sat upright. Her body was whole — the wound sealed, the damage gone, every trace of injury erased as though it had never been.
Emma threw her arms around her, laughing with relief that sounded very much like almost crying.
John turned back to Conrad.
"I won't give you the honor of last words." John's fist slammed into Conrad's face, leaving a dark bruise beneath his eye.
He grabbed Conrad by the collar and smashed his head against the wall before driving another brutal punch into his chest.
Conrad doubled over, coughing up a thick puddle of blood onto the floor.
"Was it a lie?! Was your story made up?! Answer me!" John shouted, raining blow after blow onto Conrad's battered face.
Conrad's left eye was swollen shut, his teeth shattered and scattered with blood. His chin was split open, his tongue lined with cuts, and blood streamed from cuts across his scalp and brow. He could barely breathe, let alone form a single word.
By now, Conrad's face had been reduced to an unrecognizable mess of blood and bruises.
John stared at the damage he had inflicted, his fist trembling before finally dropping to his side. He couldn't bring himself to continue.
He let out a shaky breath.
"Go… Just go. Get out of here with Ethan. Now."
Conrad slowly lifted his head, his remaining eye widening in visible shock.
"If I ever see any of you again," he said, his voice low and steady, "I won't hesitate next time."