The plan was insane. Everyone agreed on that point. But insane was all they had.
The idea was simple in concept and suicidal in execution: let Victoria capture Jaxon, let her begin the ritual to bind all twelve systems, and then—when the systems were momentarily unified—use the Death Command to destroy the network from within. It was like letting someone assemble a bomb so you could defuse it at the last possible second.
"You're asking me to hand you over to a woman who's been hunting you for months," Cross said, her arms folded. "A woman who wants to extract two systems from your living body."
"Not hand me over. Make her think she's captured me. She needs me alive for the ritual—the systems have to be active during the binding. Which means she can't just kill me. She has to bring me to
