Page 32 of Accidentally Fearless

I was striding toward the perimeter when she appeared.

Rory came around the corner at a run, still in her formal attire from the Council session, her hair escaping its tie, her eyes wide and focused. She was in crisis mode. Behind her, Zenir moved with controlled urgency, having already assessed the situation.

Our eyes met across the corridor. Everything from the past hour—the argument, the distance, the hurt—was still there. But so was something else, something that operated on a level below conscious thought.

"I'm sorry," she said, breathless. Not from running—from everything else.

"I am sorry as well."

"Later. Right now we have a battle."

"Agreed."

She fell into step beside me, and we moved toward the command center together. For those few seconds, the war outside the walls was secondary to the war that had been resolved between us.

In the command center, the scope of Therak's betrayal became clear.

"Comm codes have been changed," Zenir reported, her claws flying across a secondary console. "Defensive grid passwords have been rotated. Someone gave Krenix our entire communication architecture."

"Can you restore it?"

"Not quickly."

"Then we fight without it." I turned to Rory. "Your assessment."

She was already at the tactical display, her spiral notebook in one hand—she'd grabbed it from her quarters during the alarm, because of course she had. She was tracking Krenix's advance.

"He's overcommitted," she said. "Full assault, three axes. That means no reserves. If we can hold the perimeter and create a counterattack point, he's got nothing to fall back on." She looked up. "But without comms, your soldiers can't coordinate."

"How did you manage at the paintball arena when the headsets went down?"

She blinked. Then a slow, fierce grin spread across her face. "Hand signals. Visual markers. And a really loud voice."

"Then we do this the old way."

Zenir intercepted us before we reached the perimeter. "I found something." Her expression was grim—grimmer than usual, which for Zenir was saying something. "Therak's personal comm unit. He left it in his quarters." She held out a data tablet. "Months of communications with Krenix's intelligence officers. Troop positions, schedules, system codes. Everything."

I looked at the evidence. Months. Not days, not weeks—months of systematic betrayal. Therak had been feeding Krenix information since before Rory's arrival. Every defeat we'd suffered, every "lucky" maneuver by Krenix's forces, every time I'd wondered how the enemy seemed to anticipate our movements—Therak.

"Where is he?"

"He was not in his quarters. His armor and sidearm are missing."

He had gone to join Krenix's assault. The final play—help the enemy win, then position himself as the leader who could have prevented the disaster, if only the Council had listened.

"Arrest order," I said. "Zenir, distribute the evidence to all Council members through secured channels."

"And the battle?"

"The battle, we win."

The compound's perimeter was a controlled disaster. Without the defense grid, my soldiers were fighting on manual—position by position, team by team, the kind of grinding close-quarters combat that Velkorin warriors trained for from childhood but that modern warfare had largely replaced with technology.

Rory stood on the command platform overlooking the eastern approach—the same approach we had captured weeks ago, the terrain she knew better than anyone, and directed soldiers with hand signals, voice commands, and the sheer force of personality that had been winning her followers since her first day.

"Delta team, swing left! Thirty degrees! He's pushing a feint on the right—ignore it!"

She couldn't reach all of them. The compound was too large, the fighting too spread out, and without comms, her voice only carried so far. But the soldiers nearest to her fought with a coordination that Krenix's forces couldn't match, because they'd trained for three weeks under a woman who'd learned to manage chaos in a building full of teenagers with paint guns.