Page 91 of Anchor
The room was too quiet. Ian Chase stood at the heart of the tactical core, sleeves rolled, blood dried into the fibers of his shirt—not his blood.Reid was bleeding on a table somewhere down the hall, and every second felt like theft.
Ian didn’t look up when he heard the blast doors open. Footsteps, heavy and wet. He didn’t need to turn to know it was Terry Fields.
“Terry.” He kept his voice level, but it was carved out, like everything else. “You heard?”
Terry’s voice came quieter than usual. “Reid.”
Ian nodded once, jaw tight. “He’s alive. Foley’s working the room like a war zone. But he shouldn’t have been on the floor to begin with. They ambushed him. Clinical. Fast. They knew our blind spots and got inside.”
Finally, Ian turned. He saw it then. Terry stood pale under the lights, hair wet from rain or sweat or both. The suit hung wrong on his frame tonight. Ian couldn’t place it, but something in the way the man stood felt smaller. Still, he didn’t let that in.
“We shut down the grid,” Ian said. “No data movement. No trace signatures. Comms dead unless I authorize it with my own hands. But it wouldn’t have mattered.”
He stepped forward, voice lowering. “They knew everything. Corridor drop rotations. Lag timing. Wall camera delays. The breach hit the second Reid was alone.” His eyes locked on Terry’s. “Someone gave it to them.”
Terry didn’t deny it.
Ian pointed toward the dark console bank at the west wall. “We need to backtrace. From the core, not the nodes. I want root-level diagnostic mapping—every packet, every idle thread, every autonomous wake cycle. You built this grid with me and Kieran. If the flaw’s in the system, it's in what we trusted.”
Terry swallowed, nodding. “You want me to check the subnets?”
“Everything,” Ian said. “If there's even a flicker of signal where it shouldn’t be, I want it dead.”
Terry moved to the terminal and sat. The chair hissed low beneath him.
Ian paced. The room felt like a pressure chamber. Each clack of the keys echoed louder than it should have. His mind spun through logistics: Apex on overwatch, Kieran double-confirming roster scans, unfiltered on the system.
He trusted Terry. Trusted his instincts. Trusted the man who’d sat beside him when Ann Arbor was a blueprint on a napkin. He’d been there all those years ago when there was a hit out on his Cassie. But as he watched him work, something stirred.
Ian blinked once.He’s working too fast. “Tell me if you find anything, even a fragment.”
Ian’s eyes narrowed as he studied his friend’s shoulders, the tightness in his hands. He couldn’t tell if Terry was burying the truth or breaking under it. But either way, the clock was ticking.
UPPER OPERATIONS FLOOR – 1546 HOURS
The moment the doors opened, the air hit her like memory. Blood. Not much—just the thin, metallic trace of it, drying under the recycled chill of the ventilation. But she knew it. The smell. The weight behind it. His.
Her chest seized before her brain caught up. Her eyes found the sleeves first. Ian’s. Still rolled, still stained. The dried flecks reached past his cuffs, scattered like debris from something that had burst too close. Something that had bled too close.Reid.
Her lungs forgot how to work. Her feet didn’t slow. She crossed the room hard enough for the sound of her steps to crack the silence. “How could you?”
It came out like a whip, but she wanted to scream—to tear down walls, to break something, to drown the sick churn in her gut with noise. Not just pain. Failure.
Then her eyes dropped back to the stains. The brown-red crust at the edges of Ian’s sleeves. The proof that he’d been close. That he’d been there. And whatever words she’d built up in her throat folded in on themselves.
His arms came around her. No command, no pause—just the weight and heat of him, strong and steady. Not the president. Not the architect of whatever machine Ann Arbor had become. Just Ian. Just the man who’d loved them both too long not to try and hold her together now.
“I couldn’t reach him,” she whispered into his chest. “No one would tell me. No one would answer.”
His voice was rough when it came. “He’s alive.”
For a second, the words didn’t land. They slid past her like she’d forgotten how to hear. Then her body caught up, the world tilting just slightly.
“He’s in the OR. Still critical, but fighting.”
Her throat worked once. “Was he conscious when they found him?”
“Not when they rolled him in,” Ian said. “But he’s not gone.”
