Page 30 of Oath

That stopped us. Voodoo and I both looked at O’Rourke. His lips parted slightly, but no sound came out.

He wasn’t in control of this anymore.

“One passenger. Tall. Moving with security detail but not talking. Looks... command.”

Bones was already moving back up, gun raised, one hand signaling silently—two fingers, wide apart. Heavy armor. Likely rear guards.

Who the hell was this?

O’Rourke stared at the window like a man watching the gallows being built. “It’s Vega.”

“No.” I grabbed him by the collar and yanked him back. “Vega’s not a person.”

He shook his head, eyes wide. “They made him one.”

I swore under my breath. Sure, turn a project into flesh was one way to disguise it and utilize it. Something you could move around. Something deniable. A puppet with a dozen strings leading back to places no one could follow. It was alsobullshit. Odessa was a dead end and we were hardly in some science fiction world where you could bioengineer a program into a person.

The door banged once. Hard. Controlled.

Then again.

I turned to Bones. “Play it loud or play it quiet?”

His gaze went to the last flashbang. The shaped charge under the bar. The collapsible SMG I hadn’t even drawn yet.

I glanced at O’Rourke. “You’ve got five seconds to tell us what they want.”

He swallowed hard. “Not you. Not just Voodoo. They want the list. The drive.”

Of course they did. Odessa. Six years ago. This ghost wasn’t about to come back to life. We didn’t just bury it. We incinerated it.

Bones keyed the mic. “Alphabet, loop the feed. Make it look like we’re still inside.”

“Already done. They’re watching a frozen frame from two minutes ago. Whole team’s ghosted.”

With that, Bones was already moving again, pulling a service panel behind the bar open. Tunnel access.

I jammed the last charge under the table, synced it to remote, and kicked the chair over for good measure.

O’Rourke struggled. “Wait—what are you doing?”

“Keeping the myth alive.”

Voodoo tossed him down the tunnel first then followed with Bones right behind them, silent and cold. I hesitated for half a second, glancing once more at the door.

It banged again. Harder. Louder.

“Package on the doorstep,”Alphabet said.“Whatever’s behind that door—doesn’t knock twice.”

Exactly.

I dropped the detonator behind the bar, and slid down into the dark.

Three seconds later, the world upstairs went white.

The blast above ground was surgical. Controlled fury. A shaped charge designed not just to destroy, but to confuse. Shrapnel laced with magnesium and thermite—no simple flash, no simple burn. It would eat through anything soft and light up the rest like hell’s own fireworks show.

I landed hard in the tunnel, knees absorbing the impact as I rolled. Dirt walls. Reinforced ceiling. Stale air and narrow space, just wide enough to crawl single-file if it came to that. No one had used this exit in a decade—not until Bones found it last week during recon.