The words hit me like a physical blow, the air leaving my lungs in a short, sharp gasp."Theo," I whisper."No," Cole says immediately, his hand coming down on my shoulder, his grip almost painful. "Theo was in the hospital bed, Nora. He was asleep. We left him with Miller.""Miller is bureau, Cole. He’s not medical," I say, the logic snapping into place with a terrifying, absolute certainty. The space between wrong and right is gone. There is only the data. "The X-14 didn't fry Theo’s pathways. He told us he was the sword. He gave Miller the coordinates because he knew we would come here. He knew we would clear the site and activate the core.""He used us," Jonah says from behind us, his flashlight beam shaking against the concrete wall. "He used his own sister to bypass the security tier."I stand up, leaving Marcus in the dark. The cold in the tunnel doesn't feel like weather anymore. It feels like the inside of my father’s mind. It feels like the reality we’ve been trying to run f
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