The storm raged for three days, and Lyra slept through all of it.
The team took turns watching over her, their faces drawn with exhaustion and the lingering fear that the deactivation sequence had only been a temporary reprieve. She lay on a cot in the cottage's main room, her body still weak from the preservation fluid, her breathing shallow but steady. The interface on Troy's tablet had gone dark—the neural connection severed when the pod opened, the last traces of the Revenant code fading into silence. She was no longer a weapon. She was just a woman, fragile and lost and trying to remember how to be human.
Caleb spent most of those days at her side, his own wounds healing slowly, his mind refusing to rest even when his body demanded it. He watched her face in the dim light of the fir
