Page 133 of Operation: Defiance

My stomach dips, like the bottom dropping out of the floor.

“Five hours?” I whisper. “It just…keeps going.”

“Could it be sleep?” Asher leans forward, his eyes fixed on the screen.

“No.” The answer comes immediately. “I would have known if they’d let me truly rest.”

My breath thins—not panicked, just…untethered.

Asher scrolls down far enough for the next few entries to fill the screen.

The timestamps are there.

But the codes aren’t.

Only vitals. Blood pressure. Heart rate. And a line for stability repeated every few minutes.

My hands tremble harder.

Asher leans back slightly—controlled, measured—eyes narrowing with a quiet, contained anger.

“This is deliberate,” he says. “The absence of codes.”

I swallow. “You mean they did something and didn’t want anyone aware of it.”

“Possibly.” His jaw tightens. “Or they didn’t need to. This reads like observation. Whatever they were doing, nothing required adjustment.”

A hollow chill moves through me.

Because that—that I recognize. Not as memory, but as a feeling.

My body remembers the shape of those hours even though my mind doesn’t—stillness broken only by the cold air I could never escape. The sense that time wasn’t moving forward so much as holding. The way I learned not to move because movement brought correction.

“It was just…dark,” I whisper. “Empty in a way that made me…pliable.”

“Raine,” he says, “losing time wasn’t a failure. It was what they wanted.”

I nod, but it’s small. Fragile.

“I thought it was drifting,” I murmur. “But this—this is the beginning of everything fracturing.”

He shifts his chair closer—just an inch—enough to steady the air without touching me.

“We mark this too,” he says. “Not for what it was. For what it did.”

I press my fingertips into the table’s grain, grounding myself in something textured, something real.

“Okay,” I say. “Next.”

Asher scrolls.

At first, this next set of codes and timestamps look…normal. Evenly spaced. Structured. Almost neat.

Then another cluster appears beneath them—dense, abrupt, too sharp a contrast to ignore.

My vision starts to gray out around the edges. The room tilts a few degrees off center. Something inside me tries to step backward, out of my own body. The way it did back there when I couldn’t tell where I ended and the silence began.

“Raine.”