ZARA — ON THE SKIFF, NIGHT.
The little skiff pitched like an animal. Wind cut my face and salt stung my eyes. The crate we'd been chasing bobbed between two men who looked too practiced to be scared. One of them held a crowbar like it was a prayer; the other had a rifle with a calm face that comes from doing bad things for a long time.
"Board," Leo hissed. He moved with the ease of someone whose body learned violence before words. I hooked my legs over the rail and hauled myself up, grip sticky with spray and adrenaline.
The first man swung the rifle like a club. I ducked and felt the hot wind where the barrel missed my hair. My hand closed on the crate lid. It was taped and stamped — our shipping UID matched the ledger fragment we'd copied. This was the thing that might lead us to a firmware key. This was the thing that might mean Selina.
A boot slammed into my ribs. I spun, elbowed a man in the throat, and felt the raw, animal rush that every fight teaches you — hit first, keep moving. Leo landed beside me, a blade into a shoulder, a fist into a jaw. He's steady when it counts; he's reckless in the best way when my neck is on the line.
From the freighter above, someone laughed. Aria's silhouette cut the floodlight; she was small but the smile she carried was wide with cruelty. She raised a hand and the men on the skiff responded like puppets. Reinforcements closed.
They tried to push us off. I slammed a knee into a man's thigh and felt the skiff lurch. The crate tipped, and the man with the rifle swore — then dove after it as it slid toward the edge. For a terrible second the crate teetered and the sea took a greedy breath.
"No!" Kai shouted from where he'd boarded, clutching his leg and bleeding dark, but fighting on because that's who he is. He lunged and his fingers closed on the rope handle. He pulled like a man with island lungs and heartbreak. I grabbed the latch. Together we heaved.
The crate stayed. It was heavy, worse than a box — it felt like possibility and poison in the same breath. I ripped the lid and found a case inside: a small anodized box, not much bigger than a book. Inside that box: a memory chip and a vial with a faint blue tint.
"Fragment," Leo said, voice raw. "Firmware shard. It's one piece of the key."
Relief is a brief, dangerous thing. It arrived and then the world exploded. A flare went up on the freighter and the support skiffs peeled into attack runs. Gunfire snapped around us, ropes slithered, and the sea was suddenly a roar.
A man moved to shove Kai back; Kai's leg gave in and he fell, a grunt ripping out of him. I saw the wet bloom on his jeans and my knife hand felt useless for a heartbeat. Leo didn't hesitate: he shoved a man off, grabbed Kai's shoulders, and hauled him up with a kind of brute tenderness that made my throat close.
We were bleeding into the water and into the deck and into each other's hands. Leo's cheek brushed mine for a second — a quick, grounding thing — then he was back at a man's throat.
We fought until our knuckles hurt and the skiff was a chaos of limbs. When the support boats finally peeled away — someone up on the freighter had decided the cost was too high — we were left with the crate, three stunned men, and a new urgency.
Kai's wound was worse than we thought. He'd been shot through muscle. He gripped the chip so tight his fingers trembled. "Get it someplace safe," he rasped. "We can't let her keep moving it."
I wrapped my jacket around him, taste of metal in my mouth, and we clambered back into our boat. Leo lashed the case to his chest like a small god. He looked at me—eyes wide, exhausted—then kissed the side of my head quick, a thing that meant: I'm here; we're alive; don't fall now.
We limped toward the rendezvous point. The freighter's deck grew small in the distance and on it a small figure — Aria — folded into shadow, smiling like victory had the shape of an idea rather than a person.
<<<<<<
LEO — SAFEHOUSE, LATER — THE QUIET ROOM.
The safehouse smelled like iodine and guilt. Dr. Hassan had set up a mobile sterile area under a tarp: lights, a folding table, the careful geometry of medical hope. Rina moved through the space like a woman practicing calm. Her hands were steady when she checked Kai's wound but her eyes were not.
"You lost a lot of blood in the skiff," she said as Hassan cleaned and packed gauze into white rows. "We stapled an artery and packed it. He's stable for now but the infection risk is high. He needs antibiotics and monitoring. No heroic stunts."
Kai grinned weakly. "No promises."
Hassan's voice was soft and precise. "We'll try everything. But understand — what you're asking for with Selina is science at the edge. The risk to her is neurological trauma. The risk to you is legal, moral, and very, very personal."
Rina folded her hands. "We know the cost. We're choosing it."
Dr. Hassan looked at me, and for a second the man who trusted scalpel more than lies looked like a person who might cry. "You have to accept that even with the fragment, even with the compound, the procedure can fail. You can make someone worse. You can erase them. You can, in trying to save them, remove what made them them."
I felt the floor tilt in a way that had nothing to do with the sea. "Then we'll have tried," I said. "We'll take that risk. Selina is not a statistic on a ledger. She's my sister."
Leo put a hand over mine. The beat was small and human. "We'll do it right," he promised. "No shortcuts."
Hassan set out the tools: a microprocessor reader, sterilized syringes, a tiny centrifuge. Rina distributed orders — runners, comms, a hardline to Dr. Hassan's lab man in Beirut who could do the heavy decoding if we had a clean extract. The room filled with low, efficient noise: equipment, lists, the soft hiss of antiseptic spray.
"You'll need the full key," Hassan said. "We'll attempt a partial decode from the shard, build a synthetic reversal compound, and anchor the memory engrams with controlled exposure. This is experimental neurology plus field surgery. It's not heroic. It's necessary."
Rina's hand found mine briefly, and there was an apology in that pressure. "I didn't tell you everything before," she said. "Some of it was to get you to act. Some of it was cowardice. I'm sorry."
The apology landed like a stone and I put my hand over hers. "We don't have time for perfect answers. Just tell me what I need to do."
She told me then, steady and clear, the steps we'd take if the fragment decrypted: sedation, removal of the implant interface, infusion of the reverse compound, and a controlled reconsolidation protocol — images from our childhood, recorded voices, sensory anchors. It read like hope written in a language only desperate people can translate.
Outside, a comm chirped. Rina's face went hard. "They changed course," she said. Her thumbed message scrolled: Convoy rerouting inland — headed for Dubai desert. ETA 12 hours. Aria accelerating.
Leo's jaw tightened. The sea chase had been a piece; the desert would be the blade.
Kai stirred on the cot, white-faced. "If they go inland," he murmured, "they'll bury her deeper. We need to be ready to break into a compound."
"Then we burn a road to that compound," Leo said. His voice was steady like a weapon.
We looked at each other in that small room full of tools and terrible hope. Someone might not survive the coming days. The words had weight; they were heavy enough to bruise.
Rina snapped the sterile pack shut and stood. "We prepare for the jailbreak." She handed Hassan a small sealed packet of reagents. "When we have the firmware we'll move the whole operation. For now, keep the assets safe. If we have to break at night, we break clean."
I swallowed and thought of Selina's laugh and the way she braided hair. I thought of Marrakesh and the signed file and the hole Leo had kept from me. I thought of Aria, watching and smiling.
"Then we move," I said. "We move hard."
Leo's hand found mine across the table again. The pressure was a lifeline. Outside, the city slept uneasily, as if it knew a thing was coming for it.
We had a shard of the key, a doctor who would try, and a team that would do anything to bring a sister back. The desert would be the next theater. We were tired. We were dangerous. We were utterly alive. And we had to be faster than Aria.