Page 135 of Operation: Defiance

I want to run from it.

No.

I want to tear the whole system down.

“Keep going,” I say.

He scrolls.

My hands start trembling again—not from dissociation this time, but something sharper. Instinct. A warning my mind hasn’t caught up to yet.

A tight formation of entries settles on the screen.

Pairs of codes. A pause. Another pair.

All stamped a few minutes after midnight on the eighth day.

The day he found me.

My pulse stutters.

“There’s…intention here,” I manage. “Not routine. Not maintenance. Something else. The spacing is wrong. Too deliberate.”

Asher doesn’t look at the screen—he looks at me. “What does it feel like in your body?”

I study the interval between the codes, the sudden stillness in the middle.

“It feels…final,” I whisper. “Like…someone decided something. Not in the moment—before. And this is them confirming it.”

Asher’s jaw tightens, the only outward sign of the anger I can feel radiating off him.

“Raine,” he says quietly. “I saw this same pattern on my target’s file. A dense cluster, then a sharp pivot. I think it was where they decided you were too much of a risk to let go.”

“They asked me questions. I…agreed to whatever they wanted.” My throat works, and for a breath, I can feel the hood tied tight around my neck. “I thought…they’d release me.”

Asher scrolls to the next set of timestamps.

A new cluster fills the screen—short, violent spacing. Codes stacked too close together. My breath catches before my mind can name it.

“That’s—” My voice falters. “That’s when they came back.”

I don’t need to explain how I know.

My temples start to throb.

Asher still doesn’t speak.

“They shocked me,” I whisper. “Called it a correction. But they wanted to…wipe my mind clean.” I swallow hard. “I don’t remember much after that.”

He scrolls again.

The codes end.

What replaces them is worse.

Only vitals now. Heart rate. Blood pressure. Logged at steady intervals. No notes. No adjustments. No interaction.

My hands curl into fists. “This part,” I say slowly, “is when they left me.”

Asher’s finger stills on the trackpad. “Left you how?”

“How you found me,” I say. My chest tightens. “No one watching. No one correcting.” A hollow calm spreads through me as the truth finishes assembling itself. “That’s when I knew.” I glance at the vitals, the slow downward slope. “They weren’t waiting for me to improve. They were waiting for me to die.”

Asher grits his teeth, balls his hands into fists, then forces them to relax again.

“Raine,” he says. “The log ends here. That was the disposal cluster.”

The words don’t shock me. They confirm what I already knew.

“They weren’t going to release me,” I say. “They were done.”

I swallow hard, pressing my thumbs and forefingers together until I can feel my pulse.

“Okay,” I whisper. “That’s enough for today.”

Asher nods once, then closes the laptop without a sound.

“They made a decision,” he says, voice quiet and certain. “But they were wrong.”