Kyle’s fingers froze over his wrist-deck mid-sweep of the Pacific coordinates, a sudden realization washing the smugness off his face.
"Wait," Kyle said, blinking slowly at the holographic tactical layout. "Hold on. Ryan and Luke."
Lyra paused mid-stretch, her ears twitching. "The two hired guns Vance brought in during the European theater?"
"The very same," Kyle said, pulling up a secondary encrypted file from the stolen Reclamation drive. "When Caelus initiated the remote purge on the sister sites, Ryan and Luke weren't at Site N-01. They were pulled off the European perimeter and redeployed to secure the offshore perimeter."
Echo narrowed her ruby eyes, her grip tightening on her shotgun. "Redeployed? Or dumped?"
"Both," Kyle replied, zooming in on a set of mercenary distress transponders pinging near the Pacific coordinates. "Turns out Caelus doesn't like paying contractors when a contract expires. The moment the Paris operation went sideways, Vance marked Ryan and Luke as 'expendable assets' and locked them into the lower-deck containment grid on the ocean platform."
"So they're trapped on Caelus's fortress," I said, my voice dangerously calm as I looked down at the black star-metal broadsword resting against my hip. "Guarding the exact door we're about to kick down."
"Or waiting to get executed before we even get there," Lyra added, a mean little smile tugging at her lips. "Ryan owes me fifty bucks from the standoff in Berlin."
Echo scoffed, a dark laugh escaping her throat. "Two guns for hire locked in a cage surrounded by Caelus's private military? Sounds like they're about to become very cheap distraction logic."
I turned away from the cliff’s edge, my spatial energy flaring in a cold, silver ring around my boots.
"Kyle," I ordered. "Get that ship. We're going to the Pacific—and if Ryan and Luke are still breathing when we hit the deck, they can earn their keep."