Chapter 10: Zara Meets the Legend

The operational hub was a converted pump room on the facility's lower level, accessible through a corridor that smelled permanently of standing water and machine oil. Marcus had chosen it for the absence of windows. Vasquez had reinforced it for the absence of signal leakage. Zara had, over three years, covered approximately a third of its eastern wall with route maps and extraction schematics and casualty tallies that she updated in a handwriting so small it required a flashlight to read.

It was seven in the morning when Marcus brought Carol down.

The cell leadership was already there. Vasquez stood at the eastern wall with her arms crossed, reading one of Zara's schematics with the focused attention of someone looking for errors. Tomás sat at the worktable cleaning a disassembled handset with a cloth that had seen better months. Reyes was near the door, leaning against the wall with his weight on one shoulder, looking at nothing in particular with the studied casualness of someone who had been standing exactly there for ten minutes because he didn't know where else to put himself.