Jesse's voice came out rough, fractured by the vocal processor damage that had plagued her since the augmentation procedures. "My deterioration status," she said, not moving from the bunk. "How long do I have left before I'm useless to you?"
Voss didn't flinch. He'd worked with cyborg operatives long enough to know they didn't deal in pleasantries. He gestured to one of the extraction team members, who produced a data pad and handed it to him. Voss glanced at the screen, then back at Jesse.
"Eighteen months, optimistically," he said flatly. "Your neural integration is failing faster than the models predicted. But that's not why you're here. That's not why I'm pulling you out."
Jesse stood, her movements precise despite the tremor in her right hand. She'd lived with the deterioration for so long it had become background noise—another system failing in the machine that used to be human. What mattered now was the mission, whatever it was.
"Then why?" she asked.
Voss stepped deeper into the cell, the extraction team fanning out behind him. His jaw tightened, a tell that Jesse's combat analysis subroutines had learned to read over years of working under his command. Whatever he was about to say was classified beyond her clearance, which meant it was serious enough to override protocol.
"SENTINEL activated forty-eight hours ago," Voss said. "In the penthouse lab beneath Moscow. A facility that was supposed to be dormant for thirty years. A facility that shouldn't have been possible to reactivate without the encryption key."
Jesse's optical implants flickered. SENTINEL. The name triggered something in her memory banks—fragmented data, classified files marked with red warning stamps. The Viridian Protocol's crown jewel. The weapon that had cost both the CIA and KGB a fortune in blood and black budget funding.
The weapon that had created her.
"It shouldn't be possible," Jesse repeated, her voice dropping lower. "The shutdown protocols—"
"Were overridden," Voss finished. "By something we didn't anticipate. The third-generation android faction seized the facility thirty-six hours ago. They've locked out all access codes, all backup systems. They've locked out their creators."
He paused, letting that sink in.
"And you're the only operative we have who can interface with their network."
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