Page 25 of Rescuing Ally, Part 2 (CHARLIE Team: Guardian Hostage Rescue Specialists #8)

TWENTY-THREE

The Choice

ALLY

Morning arrives like a slap. Crusted blood cracks at the corners of my mouth when I attempt to swallow. Muscles scream from yesterday’s electricity—no, not yesterday. Longer. Time bleeds here. Stretches. Contracts. Becomes irrelevant until pain marks its passing.

There’s no window, no clock. Just the steady cycle of meals I haven’t touched and the weight of fatigue anchoring my bones.

My body remembers more than one sleepless night.

More than one round of screams echoing from Stitch’s cell.

The silence now feels—recent. Like the kind that follows a storm no one dares name.

Across the corridor, she hasn’t moved since they dragged her back. Not even to drink. The dried rust on her collar tells me no one’s cleaned her up since.

Boots thud—six pairs, not four. Heavier. Intentional. A plastic container swings from one gloved hand—gauze, antiseptic, bandages. Not mercy.

Maintenance.

“Stand.” The lead guard unlocks Stitch’s cell first.

Stitch remains motionless, a broken thing. Long seconds pass before she moves, each shift telegraphing invisible damage—broken ribs, torn muscles, lacerations hidden beneath blood-stiffened clothing. Her face remains unmarked—calculated cruelty.

Malfor wants her brain to be functional, her fingers to be operational, and her expertise to be accessible.

The rest is expendable.

A medic enters her cell, cloth scraping wounds, antiseptic hissing against open flesh, gauze wrapping lacerations. Stitch endures the torture without sound, eyes fixed somewhere beyond the walls. Treatment finished, they haul her upright by her arms.

The key turns in my lock next.

“Move.”

No medical attention for me. My damage, a split lip, bruised jaw, and muscles spasming from electric punishment, doesn’t impair my usefulness.

Jenna’s knuckles whiten around her cell bars as they drag me past. “Stay sharp,” she mouths, eyes burning with warning.

Corridors stretch endlessly today, the distance to the lab multiplying with each step.

Guards press closer than they did yesterday, fingers hovering near the remote triggers, eyes tracking every muscle twitch for signs of resistance.

New cameras swivel at each intersection, black lenses following our path like predators tracking prey.

The lab’s transformation strikes like another punishment.

Four additional guards flank the room, their rifles pointed inward rather than downward.

Three monitoring stations bristle with screens displaying our workspace from every angle.

Even the air hurts to breathe—colder, sterile, saturated with implied violence.

Dr. Elkin hunches smaller at his terminal, shoulders curved inward as though trying to disappear into his equipment. Dr. Rafeeq’s hands quiver against keyboards, the tremors traveling up his arms. Their collars dig deeper today, skin beneath raw and weeping.

A guard positions Stitch at the furthest workstation, one standing close enough behind her that his tactical vest brushes her shoulders. Her fingers move mechanically across the keys, inputting security protocols, one slow tap at a time.

My terminal glows with yesterday’s progress—quantum entanglement algorithms approaching viability. The interface shows remarkable progress since yesterday—someone worked through the night, tearing down the barriers I constructed, dismantling the problems I planted to slow progress.

Dr. Elkin appears beside me, voice barely audible. “Specialists arrived after yesterday. Added resources.” His eyes dart toward a camera. “Don’t repeat yesterday’s error.”

I won’t, although I wish Stitch told me what she was trying to do. Using code, Malfor was destined to discover her subterfuge, but she’s given me an idea. Perhaps I can leverage the quantum entanglement and turn the communications from one-way to two-way.

I could get a message out.

Succeed where Stitch failed.

Dr. Elkin’s warning costs him. A guard steps forward, his thumb pressing a remote. Dr. Elkin’s body jerks, a puppet with yanked strings, as his collar activates briefly—not as punishment, but as a reminder. He stumbles backward, fingers scrabbling at his throat, eyes watering.

It should serve as a warning. What Malfor did to Stitch and how his guards enforce discipline should stop me, but the others would want me to try, especially after what he did to Stitch.

It’s a risk, but it’s worth it. All I have to do is figure out how to send a message and tag it with geo-location.

Time dissolves into code. Quantum formulas spill from my fingers—entanglement protocols, communication systems engineered to be unjammable, untraceable, unstoppable once deployed.

Work that once filled me with wonder—particles communicating across impossible distances, defying conventional physics—now twists into obscenity as Malfor weaponizes my research.

Lunch arrives—tasteless protein bars and lukewarm water delivered silently. No breaks permitted. Bathroom visits are conducted under direct observation, dignity stripped alongside freedom.

By mid-afternoon, the system reaches a critical stage of integration. The quantum processor requires calibration with the communication arrays—a delicate procedure demanding precise timing and frequency adjustments. Dr. Rafeeq announces the phase, drawing attention from supervisory staff.

A suited technician approaches my terminal. “Proceed with quantum calibration sequence.”

The perfect moment unfolds. Guard rotation begins at the door.

It’s a momentary distraction as personnel exchange positions.

Dr. Elkin moves to assist Dr. Rafeeq with hardware connections, pulling monitor eyes toward the server rack.

The surveillance camera above my station sweeps toward the main array, creating a ten-second blind spot.

Ten seconds. My fingers fly as I introduce a mathematical cancer into the calibration algorithm.

Not crude sabotage—nothing as detectable as Stitch’s beacon attempt.

Just a fractional shift in the quantum frequency resonance.

A change so small, it slips past every failsafe.

Small enough to be overlooked. Devastating enough to rot the core from the inside out.

But that’s not all I bury.

While the system digests the poisoned algorithm, I embed something else. A subtle phase modulation, hidden within the entanglement handshake. One that doesn’t just receive, but transmits.

A ghost-pulse.

A whisper buried in the static, a signal bleeding outward, carried on the same frequency Malfor thinks he controls.

It won’t light up any screens. I’ll never know if it worked.

But Mitzy will. If anyone can hear a scream inside silence, it’s her.

I mask the alteration beneath a layer of performance tweaks, burying my intent beneath simulated efficiency. My pulse thunders. My hands are steady.

Green lights flash. Calibration complete. The system stabilizes.

They’ll think they’ve won.

Let them.

Thirty seconds pass normally. The system runs diagnostics, checking connections and verifying integrity. Then—a ripple. Tiny at first, barely registering in quantum field stability. Then another, larger.

Amber warning lights pulse across the central console.

“Field instability detected,” the automated system announces. “Quantum coherence at 92 percent and declining.”

Silence crashes through the lab. Dr. Rafeeq’s hands fly across connections. Dr. Elkin frantically scans diagnostic data. Suited technicians swarm the central server, keyboards clicking in desperate rhythm.

“Explain.” The lead guard advances, hand shifting to a weapon.

“Entanglement degradation.” Dr. Rafeeq’s voice fractures at the edges. “The quantum field’s coherence is failing.”

“Fix it.”

“Working.” Dr. Elkin pulls system logs and scans data streams. “Could be hardware interference, environmental factors, or?—”

His words die. Eyes lock onto his screen, then shift to me—a flash of horrified understanding before his expression empties.

“Found it.” His voice flattens. “Calibration algorithm modification. Quantum frequency resonance altered by 0.0037 hertz.”

“Accidental?” The technician leans forward.

“Impossible.” Dr. Elkin’s resignation saturates each syllable. “That specific value creates harmonic distortion in the entanglement field. Deliberate.”

The door hisses open. Malfor enters, hands clasped behind his back, his face carved from ice—that terrible calm that precedes his worst cruelties.

“System failure reported.” His voice carries no anger, no surprise. Only expectation.

Dr. Elkin steps forward. “Quantum calibration error, sir. We’re working to?—”

“The nature and source are already known.” Malfor cuts him off. “Miss Collins appears determined to test boundaries despite yesterday’s education.”

His gaze pins me like an insect to a corkboard.

“I didn’t—” The words die on my tongue. Malfor doesn’t care. “No! The calibration completed normally. Perhaps the hardware?—”

“Enough.” His hand rises, silencing me. “The modification carries your signature—that particular harmonic distortion pattern appears in your published research. It’s elegant, but stupid.”

“It’s in my research because it’s part of the science. I didn’t do anything.”

I did something , but I didn’t do that.

The error isn’t the ghost-pulse. That was buried too deep, masked within harmless phase modulation, encoded to mimic background quantum noise. What’s unraveling the system isn’t my message—it’s the foundation Malfor built it on.

A flaw he introduced by forcing entanglement across incompatible nodes.

An error seeded not in sabotage, but in arrogance.

He used my published equations without understanding the boundary conditions.

My framework included failsafes—counterbalancing variables meant for lab conditions, not brute-force deployment under threat of violence.