They didn’t invite us.
That’s the first and last thought. That keeps looping like a bad comm glitch no one can reroute.
They invited Nyra. They invited Mira. They invited Kaien and Eryndor—because of course they did, because that’s the shape Command prefers. The serious ones. The controlled ones. The ones who don’t laugh too loud or bleed lightning into the vents when they’re stressed.
Cassian and I?
We’re apparently the liability set.
I pace in a tight line along the edge of the Pattern Lab, boots thudding against the glass-metal floor. The room hums around me, dense with light and math and half-finished maps of the world’s worst nightmares. Holo displays float in layered stacks: Dock Seven spikes, Tower echoes, Underveil flares, and Cassian’s favorite—lattice graphs that look like a
