POV: Ryker / Caius

The war room has been stripped of everything that does not serve the next fourteen days.

Maps cover the main table in overlapping layers—outer perimeter, inner compound, service corridors, sensor strings, the older secondary approaches the operative flagged as preferred entry points. The staging facility two territories south is marked in red. The ceremony timeline sits on a separate board, still active, no longer the primary clock. The breach window is.

Caius stands at the head of the table with the operative’s statement open beside the ledger codes. Ryker moves around the perimeter of the room, checking the physical models of the wall sections that have...