The safe house was a storage unit on the city's outer industrial ring, rented three years ago under a name nobody had used since. No windows. Six hundred square feet. Damp concrete and the ghost of old motor oil.
It would hold for forty-eight hours. After that, corporate facial recognition would have worked through every camera in the district.
Mod sat against the back wall and didn't move for a while.
The broadcast was still running on every public screen in the city. His face. Aphrodite's face. Cache's profile from the corporate registry, listed under a serial number. Domestic Threat: Armed and Dangerous. Every citizen in Arcadia had seen it. Most of them twice.
Cache lay across his feet. Not asleep. Present.
Rook was in the corner with his screen angled low. He'd pulled up the district's camera grid within an hour of them arriving, and he hadn't stopped working it since. Which nodes were live, which had dead angles, which drones had been tasked to the sweep of the industrial ring in the last six-hour block. Facial recognition coverage within five hundred meters. He mapped it, noted it, updated it when the patrol logs refreshed. Nobody asked him to. He did it the way he did everything: quietly, before it became urgent.
Aphrodite moved differently now. Mod noticed it when she went to check the door seal. Hood up before she stepped anywhere near the gap. She came at it from the side, not straight on. She checked the reflection in a piece of flat metal on the shelf before she looked at anything directly. Small things. Efficient. She'd been doing them so long they weren't habits anymore. They were just how she moved.
The broadcast was still cycling on Rook's second monitor. Their faces. The photos were corporate-sourced, ID captures and street footage stitched together. Below the images, a registry line: Cache's corporate serial number, the one Flora had printed into his hardware the day they built him. Asset: 7-C-Canis-0041. Flagged: Unauthorized Operation.
Cache saw it. Mod watched him see it. Cache lifted his head, looked at the number on the screen for a moment, the way he might look at something he didn't have a word for. Then he set his head back down across Mod's feet.
Nobody said anything about the broadcast. There was nothing to say. It was the condition now. You lived inside it or you didn't.
The drive's indicator pulsed on a shelf Rook had rigged from a salvaged bracket.
After a while, Mod reached for the diagnostic cable.
"I went back in while you were moving," Genara said. Her voice through Cache's secondary speaker was steady, but layered in a way it hadn't been two weeks ago. More processing happening underneath. "Three sprints. I found the estate."
"Villanova's estate."
"His private compound, twenty kilometers outside the city. EVA-01 is in the sub-level storage, climate-controlled stasis, security rotation on a twelve-hour cycle. I have the patrol schedule, the generator backup timing, and the maintenance calendar for the sub-level access corridor."
Rook had the tactical screen up before she finished.
"There's a problem," she said. "He's moving it. He knows the rebels found Sector 3. He doesn't know we know about the estate, but he's being cautious. EVA-01 gets transferred to a Flora secure facility in the city within the week. Once it's inside corporate perimeter, we can't reach it."
The room was quiet.
"So we have days," Mod said.
"Before that if we want a clean window."
Nobody argued with the timeline. The timeline had just made its own case.
Rook spread the estate layout across the tactical screen. The compound sat on a hill: orchard to the west, mansion-lab in the center, sub-level access at the northeast corner. A single road in. Walls with sensor coverage. Mercs in rotation, not corporate regulars.
"Cache runs the orchard," Mod said.
Cache lifted his head. His lines ran a warm pulse. Not objecting.
"Orchard diversion pulls the mercs west," Rook continued. "That opens the northeast corner for approximately four to six minutes, depending on response time. Mod and Aphrodite go in for EVA. Naomi is on the transfer prep — she needs the stasis frame intact. Once we have it, we exfil north through the maintenance road."
"And the override?" Aphrodite said.
"Naomi has the sequence from the Nexus key. If EVA-01's stasis locks are standard Flora spec, she can open them in under two minutes."
"If."
"If."
They ran it twice. Nobody used the word ready.
"Cache," Aphrodite said. Not a question.
Rook looked up.
"If the override triggers during the orchard diversion," she said, "we lose four to six minutes. Corporate-controlled weapons system. In the middle of the operation." She wasn't asking if it could happen. She was asking who pivots when it does.
"We've planned for it," Mod said.
She waited.
He didn't say what the plan was.
Aphrodite looked at him. She already knew. The plan was Mod. The plan was that he goes back, not to put Cache down, not to run a neutralize protocol, but to stay close and wait until the override cycle burns out. The way he always did. The way he had every time before. She'd asked because she needed him to say it out loud, even if only to himself.
He hadn't said it out loud. That was its own kind of answer.
She looked back at the schematic.
The estate sat on the screen in front of them: orchard, perimeter wall, mansion-lab at the center. Aphrodite had been staring at the mansion-lab section since Genara first named Villanova's compound. She'd known the word for what she was feeling. She hadn't said it. She wasn't going to say it. But her eyes kept going back to the same corner of the building, the east wing, where a lab that size would run its oldest projects.
Rook caught it. He didn't ask. He just reached over and rolled the schematic view northeast, to the sub-level access corridor and the stasis vault. Their actual target. The thing they were there for.
Aphrodite let him. She looked at the northeast corner instead.
They ran it a third time.
Six hundred square feet. No windows. Twelve hours before the window opened.
Naomi went through the equipment loadout for the second time in four hours. Transfer prep kit, stasis override sequence, Cache's diagnostic relay, two backup power cells. She wasn't checking for gaps. There weren't gaps. She was checking because the alternative was sitting still in six hundred square feet with nothing in her hands.
Aphrodite cleaned her blade. Then cleaned it again. Then set it down and picked up a charge pack and ran the contacts. She'd done this in twelve different safehouses over the past three years. The ritual of it was the same everywhere. Hands busy, mind clear, or as clear as it was going to get.
Cache moved through the room in a slow pattern. Not pacing. Something more deliberate than that. He stopped at Naomi's equipment cases, put his nose to the latches, then moved on. Stopped at the tactical screen where the estate layout was still up, looked at it for a moment, moved on. Came to Aphrodite, stood beside her for a few seconds, didn't ask for anything, moved on. He came to where Mod was sitting against the wall and sat down next to him. Close enough that his plating pressed warm against Mod's arm. He didn't look at him. He just sat there.
Mod didn't say anything. He put his hand on Cache's back and left it there.
Outside, the corporate drone grid ran its sweeps. Inside, the drive's indicator held its slow pulse on the shelf Rook had rigged. The same rhythm it had held since the transfer. Steady. Patient. Present.
Rook sat with the maps after the others had gone to their corners to sleep. He wasn't tired. That happened sometimes when the stakes ran high enough: the numbers stayed sharp and the body just kept running.
He worked the approach again. Generator timing, sewer line entry depth, patrol rotation intervals. Everything confirmed. He checked the generator timing again. Still confirmed. The sewer depth was fixed, nothing would have changed it, he'd verified it twice off two independent surveys. He checked it a third time.
He knew this about himself. He was not the kind of person who trusted a thing he'd only checked twice when someone might die if he was wrong. There was a difference between checking because you needed to and checking because you were afraid, and he knew how to tell them apart. He wasn't at the fear line yet. He kept working.
An hour later, he was. Every interval confirmed. Every contingency mapped and re-mapped. Anything he found now would be something he'd invented. He closed the screen. He went to sleep.
Late that night, the others slept in shifts. Mod sat with the drive in the quiet.
"Are you afraid?" he asked. He didn't mean of the mission.
The indicator held its slow pulse.
"I don't know what I'll be on the other side," she said. "The drive was supposed to be three weeks. I've been in here longer than that. Something has changed. I can feel it when I sprint. The network used to feel like a place I was moving through. Now it feels like something I'm part of." A pause. "I don't know if that's good or dangerous."
"Which do you think it is?"
"Both, probably."
Mod looked at the indicator light.
"What do you miss?" he asked.
A pause. He expected the lab, or people, or the body she'd spent thirty-three years in.
"The sound a keyboard makes when it's been used for a long time," she said. "Specific keyboards. Not just any keyboard."
He didn't say anything.
"And the smell of the lab at two in the morning. Ozone and the faint sweetness from the Florabyte cultures." A pause. "I didn't expect those to be the things."
"What don't you miss?"
"Meetings," she said immediately. "The specific way Villanova looked at me when he'd already decided and was still letting me present." A pause that felt different from the others. "Waiting."
"For what?"
"To stop being afraid I'd run out of time before the work was done." She was quiet for a moment. "I'm not afraid of that anymore. I don't know if that's good."
"Whatever I'm becoming," she said, "I'd rather be that than nothing. I'd rather be changed than gone."
"Yeah."
Cache's lines shifted. Just for a moment, running warm gold instead of amber, the color he wore when something was right. He had been lying against the wall the whole time, listening. His lines went back to amber and he didn't move.
Mod watched him. Didn't say anything.
"Go to sleep," she said. "You need to be fast tomorrow."
Mod put his hand flat on the drive casing. It was warm from the processing. He held it there for a moment, then set it back on the shelf.
Outside, the city's corporate drones crossed and recrossed the industrial ring in their grid patterns, looking for the faces they'd broadcast. They wouldn't find them tonight.
Mod disconnected the diagnostic cable and set it on the shelf beside the drive. The indicator held its rhythm. He sat with it for a while longer, not saying anything, not needing to. There was something about the silence after a real conversation that was different from the silence before one. It had weight without being heavy. He'd learned that, somewhere between the first safe house and this one.
Cache was already asleep against the far wall. His lines ran warm amber, slow and even.
Tomorrow was another question. Tonight had been enough.