The satellite phone slipped from Luna's fingers, clattering against the marina's warped floorboards as static swallowed Mr. Qi's fading voice. "—Lassa fever...quarantine...delay my return—" The words coiled in the air like gun smoke. Mr. Dave snatched the device before it could slide into the oily puddle near Luna's boots, his knuckles whitening around the scratched plastic casing. "Your old man caught a biowarfare special?" He thumbed the call history with a grease-stained finger, the motion sharp with barely contained energy. Chloe was already diving into her laptop, the blue glow painting hollows under her eyes as medical reports flashed across three split screens. "Lassa virus—endemic to West Africa but..." Her breath hitched. "Outbreaks reported near Guatemalan refugee camps last month." Ari kicked a rusted anchor chain hard enough to send it skittering across the concrete floor. "So we're just supposed to—" "Stand down." Dave's command cracked like a .50cal round, freezing them all mid-motion. "This wasn't about us."
Dawn bled through the broken skylights in jagged streaks as Chloe pieced together their near-disaster, her fingers flying across the keyboard with mechanical precision. The security footage showed Red Dragon enforcers methodically destroying server racks long before their team had breached the perimeter. "They were purging records before an FBI raid," she muttered, rotating a 3D model of the dojo. "Our op overlapped with their burn protocol by twelve minutes." Lexi's finger stabbed at the screen, freezing an infrared image where Luna's pendant glowed like a beacon amidst the chaos. "But they changed vectors when they saw this." The crescent metal pulsed against Luna's collarbone, suddenly warm as fresh-spilled blood.
The hospital's biocontainment unit hummed behind inch-thick glass, its sterile white light bleaching all color from Mr. Grey's shivering form. Luna pressed her palm to the cold surface, watching hazmat-suited figures move like ghosts behind the plastic quarantine barrier. A doctor's muffled voice crackled through the intercom: "Fever spiking to 103.9. Started ribavirin but his neutrophil count—" The rest dissolved into static as tires screeched outside. Mrs. Grey's Mercedes nearly took out an orderly as she erupted from the vehicle, her designer heels clicking like gunshots across the pavement. "You!" She lunged at Luna, manicured fingers hooked into talons. "This is your fault! Charles was fine before—" Security intercepted her mid-swipe, but the venom in her voice lingered like cheap perfume.
Back at the marina, Mr. Qi's second transmission came through military-grade encryption, his face flickering across Chloe's screen like a ghost in the machine. The swaying lanterns behind him suggested a cargo container or maybe a ship's hold. "Grey's exposure was deliberate," he said without preamble, cutting through their half-formed questions. "Red Dragon was hired to eliminate a Blackwatch informant. You walked into their crossfire." Dave spat into a coffee can, the sound wet and disgusted. "So why'd they come at us like we pissed in their cereal?" The screen zoomed in on enhanced security footage—Luna's pendant emitting a subtle energy pulse that made the Red Dragon operatives freeze mid-assault, their weapons swinging toward her with sudden, terrifying focus. Ari let out a low whistle, spinning a butterfly knife around her finger. "That's some fancy jewelry you got there, L." "More than you know," Mr. Qi said, his image distorting as the signal degraded. "They're coming for it. Dave—weapons check in five." The transmission died in a burst of static as Luna's pendant flared white-hot, the vision hitting like a sucker punch: a gaunt man in a ruined lab coat, vials of blackened blood boiling in their racks, the words "She's not ready" howling through smoke-filled corridors. She came back to herself on the floor, the taste of copper flooding her mouth as four pairs of hands steadied her. Dave racked the slide on his Mossberg with a sound like bones breaking. "Looks like we're throwing a welcome party."
The rest of the day passed as they sat at the safehouse after leaving the medical facility.
The safehouse reeked of gun oil and stale adrenaline as Dave tossed weapons onto the rickety card table, each piece landing with the finality of a death sentence. "Rule one," he growled, slamming a magazine into an AR-15 with enough force to make the table legs shudder, "we don't let them take the damn necklace even though I don't know why they need it either ." Chloe's fingers trembled slightly as she calibrated her signal jammers, the LED lights reflecting in her wide eyes. "Blackwatch Solutions specializes in biotech, not black ops. Why would they—" Ari's knife thunked into the wall beside a peeling "No Fishing" sign, the blade vibrating with pent-up energy. "Maybe they lost their favorite test tube and think Luna's wearing it."
" But I've been wearing it since I can remember and dad said that it was with me when they found me" Luna said her voice quiet but confused and Mr Dave shook his head as he loaded the weapons.
The pendant pulsed against Luna's skin like a second heartbeat, the rhythm syncing with the distant wail of police sirens growing closer through the thin marina walls.
The first explosion came without warning, shaking the building hard enough to send Lexi's staff clattering to the floor. Fishing nets outside burst into flame, the acrid smoke curling through the broken window as six figures emerged from the haze—faceless in tactical gear except for their leader. Luna's breath caught in her throat as she took in the gaunt man's hollow cheeks and sunken eyes, his face a perfect match to her visions. Dave's shotgun barked first, the sound deafening in the confined space. "Fire in the hole!"
Chaos erupted in a symphony of violence. Ari moved like a wild thing unleashed, diving through the shattered window and rolling behind a stack of moldy crab traps before hurling one of Dave's "special recipe" smoke grenades—stuffed with enough chili powder to make a SWAT team weep. Chloe's fingers flew across her keyboard even as bullets whizzed past her head, her EMP pulse frying three attackers' optics before a well-placed round shattered her laptop screen. "They've got dampeners! I can't—" Lexi's staff became a blur of motion, the polished wood whistling through the air as she carved a path toward the docks, the bullet graze along her ribs doing nothing to slow her deadly precision.
Luna barely registered the gaunt man's lunge until the pendant flared white-hot against her skin. Her body moved without conscious thought—a crescent kick delivered with enough force to shatter his nasal bone with a wet crunch. For one terrifying second, she saw through his eyes: sterile lab walls the color of clotted blood, children suspended in glass cells with golden veins glowing beneath their skin. The vision shattered as Dave's armored SUV plowed through the dock gates, the screech of metal on metal drowning out the gaunt man's gurgling breath. "Not today, Frankenstein!" Ari yanked Luna backward just as a glinting syringe appeared in the gaunt man's hand, Dave's shotgun reducing it to glittering shards in mid-air.