The transition from the stillness of the Sicilian mountains to the kinetic, sweltering chaos of the Nigerian coast was not a journey; it was a dislocation. For Seraphina, the forty-eight-hour preparation window felt like watching a storm front move in—the air pressure dropping, the sky bruising into shades of slate and violet. They were no longer "recovering." They were mobilizing.
Alessandro had brought the Aegis team back online with a surgical precision that bordered on the terrifying. Sloane and Vane arrived at the villa under the cover of a mountain mist, their expressions unreadable but their movements synchronized. There were no reunions, no debriefs about the grotto. They simply fell into the rhythm of the new mission: The 18th Ledger.
"The UNIZIK mission files aren't in a cloud,
