#Chapter 212: Planning the Defense

The echo hit as I stepped into the war chamber. It wasn’t sound or pain in the traditional sense, but something physical, a pressure that knocked my balance off before I could recover it. It wasn’t an image or a memory, not at first. Just a jolt of awareness that didn’t belong to me. I grabbed the edge of the table, trying to ground myself, even as something inside me reached beyond the room. A colder place, built out of silence more than stone. Where the lack of sound felt like its own kind of scream. The images came fast, bleeding into each other too quickly for me to make sense of them. A girl, no older than thirteen, with bloodshot eyes and cracked knuckles, pounding against a steel door with no answer. A man on his knees, so thin he looked hollow, lowering a child into a narrow shaft. Then a shipping container packed with bodies, shoulder to shoulder, eyes wide and frantic as their mouths moved in wordless panic. They weren’t soldiers. They weren’t Dominion agents. These wer