On the next day, the team decides that they need to set up and find more resources before they can engage the new threats. Minka and Sannet would go as a team to procure some intels while Viola and Leanna would gather more resources for the coming fights.

  Sannet and Minka planned to swing through the lower lanes, buy maps and rumors from a keeper who sold both, and be back before the others finished shaking tails at the market. Simple, clean, quiet.

  They didn’t make it three turns before the city began to lean them elsewhere.

  Sannet walked by feel. She skimmed the edges of crowds, kept to the airflow, and read the way steam pressed from cracked vents. Every few doorways she marked something small—a thumbprint of chalk beneath a hinge, a bit of lint flicked from a wire seal—saying she saw the trap and chose the other step. Her face was composed, but she was counting. Angles, cameras, listening plates. The habit was a metronome in her head.

  Minka said little and moved fast. When a lane split, she pointed right and looked left. Her shoulders were set like armor; her hands were busy with everything that could be busy—checking buckles, straightening a cuff that didn’t need it. Twice she walked straight past clean routes because a different street had a single peeling sticker she recognized from before the black site. The second time, Sannet let them drift that way and took one slow breath through her teeth.

  “You’re a street off,” Sannet said lightly as they passed a shuttered tea stall. “Dealer’s on the spine-line, not the seam.”

  “We’ll angle back,” Minka said, too quickly.

  “Mm,” Sannet answered, not disagreeing and not agreeing, only storing it. She watched the set of Minka’s jaws, the way she caught herself glancing up at second-floor windows, the way her pace shifted around certain corners—faster here, slower there, like feet remembering the rhythm of a life you swear you haven’t been living.

  They crossed under a sagging banner. A trio of kids burst from a stairwell and thundered past them, laughing, and Minka flinched like the sound hit a bruise. She recovered with a flat breath and kept going. Sannet didn’t miss it. She let two more turns go by, then stopped at a junction where the light pooled in a shallow square and the smell of laundry soap covered the oil.

  “If we keep south,” Sannet said, eyes on the dirty tiles, “we’ll miss the spine-line by three blocks and walk right by your building.”

  Minka’s mouth opened, closed. Color rose high on her cheekbones. For a moment she looked younger—less sharpened by purpose, more caught out by it. “We can— We’ll loop back after,” she said.

  Sannet lifted her gaze to her, steady, not hard. “Who are we seeing?”

  Minka looked at the ground and picked at a loose thread on her glove with her thumbnail. The thread snapped. “Emilia,” she said. The name came out thick and small, as if it had been kept under something heavy. “Just for a minute.”

  “How long has it been?” Sannet asked, softer.

  “Too long.” Minka said, and then surprised herself by adding, “I kept meaning to— and then there was always another corridor.”

  Sannet’s face didn’t move much, but something gave in her shoulders. “All right,” she said. “Just don't wait too long, we don't want to worry the other two.”

  Minka blinked. There wasn't an argument there, just a thing offered she hadn't known to ask for. Her knuckles went pale where they gripped her jacket: "I thought you'd... insist we stick to the plan."

  The ghost of a smile touched Sannet’s mouth. “The plan needs you whole. Not just walking.” She looked down the alley toward the old apartment block. “We’ll take the back way. Less eyes. But if she's not home, we are leaving." It wasn't a question.

  Minka nodded. "Alright. I— thank you, Sannet." The gratitude sounded foreign in her own ears, a word she wasn't used to speaking anymore. They sneaked in through the back door that Sannet managed to open within a second, and then they were in the building. The air inside was familiar, laced with the faint scent of dust and the lingering aroma of the wooden furniture. They climbed the stairs, the metal groaning softly under their weight. Minka’s heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic rhythm that drowned out the city’s murmur outside. They reached the door, and Minka raised her hand to knock. But before her knuckles could touch the weathered wood, the door was pulled open.

  Emilia stood there, her expression unreadable, her brown eyes holding a quiet intensity that seemed to pierce right through Minka's carefully constructed walls. She wore a simple gray shirt, a smudge of ink on her cheek: "I heard you two coming up the stairs." She said dryly, without any of the joy one might expect from a reunion. "What do you two want?"

  The question was a gauntlet thrown at their feet. Minka hesitated, the speech she’d rehearsed in her head a thousand times evaporating in an instant, leaving only ashes on her tongue. A beat of silence stretched in the narrow hallway. Emilia’s gaze, a perfect mirror of Minka’s own, held nothing of the warmth Minka had desperately hoped for. Only cool appraisal, and beneath it, a well of something deeper and much older. Resentment. It was a tangible thing in the small space, making the air feel thick and hard to breathe.

  Sannet shifted beside her, a silent, grounding presence. She didn’t speak, just leaned against the doorframe, her arms crossed loosely, a silent signal that this was Minka’s conversation to have.

  Minka swallowed past the lump in her throat. The words felt clumsy, heavy. "I... I wanted to see you. To know you were safe."

  Emilia scoffed, a soft, brittle sound that was more painful than a shout: "Yeah... Safe to know that I have a wanted fugitive in my house now." She took a step back, a deliberate distancing. "You should go."

  The words were a physical blow. Minka flinched as if she’d been struck, her knuckles whitening where she gripped the strap of her pack. "Emilia, please. Just hear me out."

  "No," Emilia cut in, her voice sharpened like a shard of glass. "You left. You went off to... to be a hero, or a rebel, or whatever you call it now. You didn't think about what would happen to the people you left behind. We had to deal with it all. The questions. The searches." She paused, her eyes hardening. "I didn't need this."

  The accusation hung in the air, thick and poisonous. Minka felt the old defenses begin to rise, the familiar walls of just anger and self-preservation. She had fought, she had bled, she had done it all. But looking at Emilia’s face—the set of her jaw, the guarded hurt in her eyes—the defenses crumbled, replaced by a cold wave of shame.

  "I know," Minka said, her voice raw, stripped of all bravado. She stepped forward, not aggressively, but as if trying to bridge the chasm that had opened between them. "I know I left. I know I put you in danger. But I... I couldn't let them win. I couldn't just... disappear without a fight." She took a ragged breath. "I thought... I thought I was protecting you."

  Emilia’s laugh was short and without humor. "By becoming one of the most wanted people in the sector? By making our home a target? Some protection, Minka."

  "Emilia," Minka's voice cracked, the name catching in her throat like a sob. Her hands, which had been clenched into fists at her sides, slowly uncurled, revealing the raw, red lines where her nails had dug into her palms. Her eyes, usually blazing with defiance or focused with a warrior’s intensity, were now wide and pleading. "I messed up." The words were a whisper, a confession carried on a trembling breath. "I messed everything up. I’m so sorry, Emilia. I should have been here for you."

  She looked down, unable to meet her sister's unforgiving gaze any longer. "I should have taken you with me. Away from home... kept you with me."

  Emilia watched her, her own posture rigid. For a long moment, the only sound was the distant hum of the city. But then, the rigid line of Emilia’s shoulders softened almost imperceptibly. The hardness in her eyes didn't vanish, but it seemed to recede, revealing a flicker of the vulnerability beneath. She let out a long, slow breath, the air hissing from between her teeth as if she’d been holding it for years.

  "Idiot," Emilia muttered, but the word had lost its edge. It was weary, laced with something that sounded painfully like relief. She finally stepped in, she gave a punch at Minka's chest.

  It should’ve hurt. It should’ve made her fold even a little. Instead, Minka barely shifted. The blow landed like a knock on a sealed door—felt, acknowledged, unmoved.

  Emilia’s eyes flared. She stared at her knuckles, then at Minka’s face, as if the lack of reaction were an insult thrown back at her.

  “You don’t even feel it,” she said, not quite a question, not quite an accusation.

  Minka’s mouth opened, then closed. She reached up and covered Emilia’s fist with both hands, gentle, as if the strike had been made of glass. “I feel it,” she said. “Just… not where you hit.”

  Emilia yanked her hand free and scrubbed it against her shirt, as if shaking off something she hadn’t meant to touch. “Of course. Minka the unbreakable.” She tried to sneer. It came out tired. “This explains that you can be so reckless with your actions."

  Sannet didn’t move from the jamb, but the set of her shoulders shifted—attention tightening, ready to take the room down a notch if it needed it. She said nothing and let the silence hold. She then suddenly felt something like a calling to her... a calling that was familiar, that she hasn't felt in years. It is Trazyn's call for her.

  Sannet's head tilted slightly, her eyes losing their focus on the room in front of her for a split second. The subtle shift was so minuscule, anyone else would have missed it. But it was there—a flicker in her calm, a tremor beneath the surface of her composure. She glanced down at the hallway, she knows he's there. It's faint, the old encrypted vibration along her subdermal comm band—long dormant, buried under protocols she thought she’d severed. But it was his signature. Trazyn. His silent, demanding summons, threading through dead channels and forgotten backdoors like a ghost in her bones. It wasn’t loud. It never was. It didn’t need to be. It was simply there: a stone dropped in the still lake of her mind.

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  Seeing how Minka is reconciling with Emilia, Sannet finally decided to silently type in the message "What?" on the device on her arms.

  The response came with surgical precision, words appearing as a minimalist line of encrypted text on the edge of her optic feed. They flickered, visible only to her—a pale white slash against the low-light gloom of the hallway: "Just checking if you are breathing." That's it. No more, no less. The sheer mundanity of it was more jarring than any command could have been.

  Sannet’s jaw tightened. The message wasn’t concerning. It was a claim. An assertion of access. A reminder that no matter how far she ran, how deep she buried herself, he still had a string tied to the one part of her that couldn’t be armored over. He could find her. And he could remind her, with six harmless words, that he still existed in the architecture of her life. Sannet moves her eyeball to open the comm channel, and she responded: "FU" She typed. But then she glanced back at Minka and Emilia, then she erased the FU and then she finally decided to properly type: "Is there something you need from me?"

  A longer pause this time, heavier than before. The seconds stretched like taffy, thinning under the weight of expectation. Then the words scrolled across her vision, slow and deliberate, each letter materializing with clinical precision, as if Trazyn were savoring the construction of each one: "No, but I am just checking on you and my daughters." Sannet's jaw tightened, a muscle fluttering in her cheek. She could almost hear the measured cadence of his voice in her mind, that calm, paternal tone that always felt more like interrogation than concern. "Are you truly happy with your life now?" The question lingered on her retinal display, burning like a brand, its simplicity a carefully constructed trap. Her fingers stilled against the device on her arm, the rapid pulse in her wrist betraying the calm facade she maintained. Outside the hall, the city's distant hum continued, oblivious to the silent war being waged in her neural interface. "You have no right to ask that," she typed back, the words a stark, white flash on the small screen, a sharp jab against the digital canvas. "My life is mine to live now, and my happiness is not a data point for you to analyze. I'm with Minka. That should be enough for you."

  Sannet glanced at Minka and Emilia, the two seemed to finally calm down, but there's still tension. She sighed, and then she turned her focus back to the communication device. Trazyn's reply came faster this time, a swift counter that sliced through her attempt at a boundary. It pulsed onto her screen, an insidious and familiar green. "My dear Sannet, I did not ask for your life's data. I simply made an inquiry as a father and a friend would do. Furthermore, you know Minka's emotional state is rather unstable, which makes her more vulnerable to the current flow of events and her own rage." The words felt like a hand reaching through the screen, a cool, logical grip on her shoulder that was at once dismissive and utterly controlling. "I merely wished to ensure she was in capable hands." Sannet felt a cold knot tighten in her stomach, the words 'capable hands' landing with a heavy thud. She stared at the message, the soft blue glow of the screen illuminating the faint tension around her eyes. It was his classic move, weaving a cloak of plausible deniability around a core of sharp manipulation.

  She exhaled slowly, a quiet breath meant to steady her, but the fire in her chest was already reigniting. Her fingers danced across the keypad, a sharp, staccato rhythm of frustration and defiance. "Her emotional state is a direct result of things you have done," she typed back, the words appearing with an almost violent intensity on the screen. "So don't you dare pretend you're concerned for her well-being. This is about control, Trazyn. It always is. And if you truly want to help, you'll stop trying to 'ensure' and start respecting the choices she makes."

  Another long pause, this time so profound that the silence in the hall began to feel like a physical presence. Minka and Emilia watched her, a silent understanding passing between them, Emilia waved her hand in front of Sannet's eyes: "You okay?"

  Sannet blinked a few times, the holographic text from Trazyn fading slightly in her vision as she returned her focus to the room. "Yes," she said, her voice a little too smooth. "Just... scheduling issues."

  "Your face is a bit red..." Minka pointed out, her eyes studying her closely. The observation hung in the air between them, laced with the kind of concern that couldn't be hidden beneath her usual bravado. Her green eyes narrowed slightly, tracing the faint flush across Sannet's cheeks like a cartographer mapping unfamiliar terrain. "Are you sure?" she asked, her voice a low murmur that barely disturbed the dust motes dancing in the shaft of light from the grimy window.

  "I'm fine," Sannet said, her tone clipped, a wall of finality. "I was just recalling something I need to take care of. Don't worry about it." She turned her body away slightly, a subtle dismissal, but her attention was still partially submerged in the conversation waging war in her augmented reality.

  Minka, unconvinced, took a step forward, her instincts screaming that something was wrong. But before she could press further, they heard a noise of groceries dropping from hands on the floor. Both Minka and Emilia turned to see a woman with brown hair in a ponytail. She was holding an empty basket, and the dropped groceries had scattered on the floor. She stared at them with a wide-eyed expression, a mixture of shock and a strange, disjointed recognition. "M-Minka?" she stammered, her voice a thin reed in the suddenly tense silence. "Is... is that really you?"

  Minka froze, her eyes wide with disbelief, her mind struggling to place the face that had just shattered the fragile peace of the room. "Mom?...I- I can expl-" Before Minka could say anything further, Monika Terra, her mother, strode forward, her movements no longer hesitant but filled with a raw, fierce energy. She closed the distance between them in three steps and wrapped Minka in a hug that was almost desperate, her grip tight enough to feel like an anchor in a storm. "I thought you were dead... Thank the emperor you're safe." Her voice was thick with unshed tears, her face buried in Minka's shoulder.

  Sannet stepped back into the doorframe, her face a carefully constructed mask of neutrality, as she watched the raw, unrestrained emotion flood the room. This was not her world, not her language. She was an intruder in this sacred space of mother and daughter, a ghost at a family reunion she had no right to witness.

  The text on her retinal display pulsed. It was Trazyn again, a new, single line that cut through the emotional noise of the room like a cold scalpel:

  "Anchor Spire. Forty eight hours. Helix will be tested. Keep her alive."

  Her throat went dry. Of course he wouldn’t say please. Of course he’d phrase it like a calendar reminder—nothing to see here, just the end of a thousand cities if they were late.

  Monika’s arms were still locked around Minka. The sound that came out of Minka was not a word—more like air ripping as the pressure changed. Emilia let out a breath she’d been holding for years and stepped in, wrapping both of them up from the side, like she needed contact to believe geometry again.

  Sannet drew her eyes off the scrolling letters and forced them back into the room. Not her world, but it was Minka’s. That made it hers enough.

  She blinked the channel open, thumb hovering over a single letter.

  Bastar-

  She erased it without sending. Typed instead:

  “No. We’re done doing it your way.”

  Another line arrived almost before she finished, cool as glass:

  “A father can be proud and prudent at once.”

  She killed the link, hard—shunting power to a tiny coil she’d been saving for a day she hated, letting it spike white-noise through the subdermal. The old channel fuzzed and guttered out. For a second her vision glittered with afterimages. Then the world snapped cleanly back into the cramped kitchen, where a mother was whispering “you’re safe” like a prayer she didn’t believe in yet.

  “Your face,” Emilia said again, gentler now. “You’re really okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Sannet said. This time it didn’t sound like a wall. “Just... got annoyed by a message I got."

  Monika let go of Minka, taking a half step back, her hands resting on Minka's shoulders as if to reassure herself that her daughter was real. Her eyes, the same emerald green as Minka's, finally moved from Minka's face to land on Sannet. The gratitude was palpable, a heavy, shimmering thing in the small space. "Sannet." she said, her voice still thick with emotion. "Thank you. Thank you for bringing her back to me." She then pulls Sannet into a hug, Sannet raises her hands in a rare moment of panic, her fingers hovering awkwardly in the air for a beat before gently settling on Monika's back. It was a brief, almost unnaturally stiff hug.

  "I've always hated your hugs." Sannet said as she then slowly pats Monika's back.

  "Always so stiff..." Monika sighs as she then lets go of Sannet. "Now, both of you. Sit. I'll make some tea. We have a lot to catch up on." Her voice held the unshakeable authority of a mother, a force of nature that refused to be denied. She moved with practiced efficiency, retrieving the fallen groceries and setting a kettle on a small stove.

  Sannet's eyes met Minka's with an intensity that spoke volumes. A subtle flicker, a slight narrowing of her gaze—the signal was clear. Minka hesitated for a heartbeat before giving a barely perceptible nod, understanding passing between them like a silent current. "Actually, Mom," Minka began, her voice carefully measured as she took a seat at the table, "we can't stay long. We're in the middle of something important." Sannet settled into the chair beside her, maintaining her composure despite the tension radiating through her posture. Monika took the seat opposite them, her gaze sweeping over them, taking in the lines of tension, the lingering exhaustion etched beneath their eyes. "Important, huh?" Monika’s expression shifted, the raw relief of the reunion beginning to temper with a mother’s wary intuition. "More important than your family?"

  Minka flinched. "That's not fair," she said, her voice low. "It's because of my family that I'm doing this. All of it."

  Monika’s eyes didn’t waver. She leaned forward, her hands clasped on the tabletop. "When you were in that black site, I thought I was the worst mother in the galaxy for not being able to protect you." Her voice broke on the last word. "And now you show up here, looking like you've been fighting a war... I deserve to know what's happening."

  Minka's gaze dropped to the tabletop. She ran a finger along a crack in the aged wood, the small, physical imperfection a welcome distraction from the weight of her mother's stare. "It's a long story," she started, her voice barely above a whisper: "But... if you can-"

  Before Minka could ask, Monika signed her to stop: "Listen... Minka, If I could fight alongside you, I would." Her voice, while soft, held an unyielding strength, a bedrock of maternal resolve. "But I have Emilia to think about now... I can't. I need to stay here. To be the one who's waiting this time. To be the safe harbor."

  The admission hung in the air, heavy and bittersweet. Monika reached across the table, her hand coming to rest on top of Minka's. Her touch was warm, a stark contrast to the cool air of the room. "But that doesn't mean I'm helpless." Monika phased out a card, it is written: Access Omega-9. "This is a keycard. It will get you in every single imperial facility in this sector, without a single question asked. Take this as a personal revenge for Nova's decision to keep my dear daughter into a black site."

  A flicker of something fierce and bright ignited in Minka's eyes as she stared at the card. This was more than just a tool; it was a reprieve, a lifeline in the treacherous waters ahead. "I don't know what to say," she breathed, the card feeling cool and impossibly heavy in her palm.

  "You are still as petty as you used to be Monika..." Sannet commented with a rare, subtle smile touching her lips, the first genuine one since she had stepped into the apartment. The sight of it was surprising, a crack in her usually stoic facade. "I am starting to see from whom Minka got her attitude from."

  Monika huffed out a soft laugh, a sound that was both sad and fond. "She gets a lot of things from me. Stubbornness. That damn temper." She looked at Minka, her expression softening. "And a heart that's too big for her own good, always fighting for others."

  Emilia, who had been quietly observing the exchange, stood up and walked over to the kitchen counter. She fumbled in a drawer for a moment, then returned, placing a simple, yet sturdy-looking medkit on the table. "Here," she said, her voice quiet but firm. "You guys look like you've been through hell. This is... better than what you'll find out there. It's got the good stuff." Her eyes met Minka's for a brief, intense moment, a silent understanding passing between them. "Just... try not to get so bloodied up next time. It's a pain to clean up."