The General Barked an Odd Command No One Could Understand – Until the Cleaning Lady Snapped to Attention.

The extraction bird was a short-range tactical lifter, unmarked, unremarkable and exactly the kind of transport no one asked questions about. Its blades spun low and slow, cutting through the morning fog like a blade through gauze. Cassia climbed in first. Ashford followed, then Mave, sliding into the opposite seat like she’d done this a hundred times before.

Stratton remained on the tarmac. He didn’t step forward. Didn’t raise his hand. He just stood there, hands behind his back, face carved in stone. It wasn’t respect. It wasn’t farewell. It was acknowledgment from one survivor of impossible things to another.

Cassia met his eyes through the glass and nodded once. The ramp lifted. The cabin sealed. Inside the hum of the engines felt oddly peaceful. No chatter, no mission brief. Just the quiet between people who had burned through a system designed to consume them and came out colder but still standing.

Mave broke the silence first: “You know they’ll rebuild Centravex, version three, maybe with a new name.”

Cassia stared ahead: “Then we train in the dark again.”

Ashford asked: “You think Belle was really acting on Graves’ orders, or was he already feeding something deeper?”

Cassia answered without hesitation: “He was just one more hand feeding a hungry machine.”

Mave smirked: “Funny, that’s what Graves said about us.”

Ashford leaned back: “So what now? We just fly into exile?”

Cassia’s voice came calm, final: “No. We recalibrate.”

She reached into her jacket, pulled out a thin unmarked drive. The real one, not the decoy they burned in front of Stratton.

Ashford blinked: “You lied to him.”

Cassia didn’t even turn: “I told him enough.”

Mave chuckled: “She never left the game, Ash. She just changed boards.”

Cassia handed the drive to Ashford: “You’ll know what to do with this.”

He took it, eyes narrowing: “What’s on it?”

“Not everything,” she said. “Just enough to make sure if Raven ever wakes up again, it answers to us. Not them.”

They sat in silence as the lifter cut through the sky, leaving behind the fences, the towers, the command structures and all the names they no longer wore. Raven was gone, but its shadows weren’t.

And somewhere inside the bones of a sleeping system, deep in the ghost nodes of Centravex, a line of dormant code pulsed faintly. Raven09 status silent response protocol standby condition unresolved. Cassia closed her eyes and let the silence hold.