The warehouse became a laboratory, a war room, and a prison all at once.
Raina commandeered a corner of the space and transformed it into a makeshift medical bay, her equipment spread across tables that had once held shipping manifests and rusted tools. The surgical instruments she had brought from the island were inadequate for the task ahead—the implant was a piece of technology far beyond anything available in the civilian world—but she improvised, adapting, scavenging, building what she needed from the scraps of the world they had left behind.
Lyra lay on a cot in the center of the medical bay, her eyes fixed on the ceiling, her hands folded over her chest. She had insisted on being awake for the initial scans, refusing sedation until it was absolutely necessary. The machines around
