The Templars' first assumption was retaliation from the Brotherhood—two thousand years of history made that the obvious read. This was simply how the Brotherhood operated. It was no particular surprise.
Then the investigation surfaced the White Ghost's true identity, and the Inner Sanctum's remaining eight members found themselves at a loss. Was this a personal action? Or was it an opening move by whatever organization stood behind the White Ghost?
If an outfit at that level were entering the conflict, the ramifications would be enormous. They couldn't afford to be rash.
The hunt for Brotherhood remnants continued, but a significant share of Templar resources and attention was suddenly redirected.
Bella had bought herself breathing room. She could begin untangling the Brotherhood's internal situation one thread at a time.
"Fire!" Bella ordered.
The Brotherhood operative raised his M4A1 and fired a burst directly at her.
The rounds struck a translucent white shield floating in the air in front of her, each impact producing rapid thudding—like pebbles dropped into still water. The ripples faded. Nothing got through.
This was the energy barrier she'd constructed using the Koh-i-Noor. In its current configuration, it deflected handgun and rifle rounds from any angle, full 360 degrees. Combined with her ice-armor, even long-range sniper fire could be handled.
Preserved inside the Koh-i-Noor was a fragment of Durga's residual consciousness—or what had once been Durga, an Isu entity. Technically, what remained wasn't a person so much as a remnant impression. Bella had spent half a day trying to communicate with it. The results were limited to inarticulate screaming and incoherent cursing.
From the fragments, she'd gathered that Durga had attempted some kind of manifestation at some point—and had been badly damaged for it. What was left was hiding in the deepest layer of the diamond, barely functional.
Bella had sealed off the deepest level of the Koh-i-Noor's energy structure. That was where Durga would stay, permanently.
The Koh-i-Noor had three core functions: the energy barrier, a concentrated energy discharge, and a locating capability for other Isu artifacts. The locating function had produced poor results—most surviving Isu relics appeared to be in Templar hands. But the first two functions were consistently useful.
The diamond itself was too large for jewelry in any conventional sense. Bella had a Brotherhood craftsman mount it in a crown—an actual crown, stolen from a tsar roughly eighty years prior.
In her spare moments, she'd been known to put it on and consult her flattering mirror—the Yata no Kagami.
"Yata Mirror, Yata Mirror, who's the most beautiful of them all?"
"Isabella Swan, my most esteemed sovereign—you, unquestionably, are the most beautiful woman in the world! (????)"
The praise was constant—and shameless. Since acquiring the Koh-i-Noor, Bella had noticed something—a quality she couldn't pin down precisely, but it was real. Her presence felt different. Not anything visible or measurable. Just a shift in her own awareness of herself, something that hadn't been there before.
Ten days later, the Russian chapter reported back with the Vankos' whereabouts.
Anton Vanko was a distinguished nuclear fusion specialist. Ivan Vanko's expertise was broader—computer science, nuclear physics, mechanical engineering. All of it was self-taught, and all of it ran deep.
During the Cold War, Anton had been expelled from the United States and resettled in the Soviet Union. Then, through some arrangement made behind closed doors between the US and USSR—the details of which Bella had never learned—the Soviets had agreed to the exchange of valuable concessions, pinned a theft charge on Anton, and arrested Ivan as well. Both father and son ended up in a Moscow prison.
Bella had assumed they'd been sent to Siberia. The Russian chapter corrected her.
Ivan's sentence ran until 2008, after which he faced exile—but he was still inside. Anton's case was more complex. Men of his caliber didn't get shot or abandoned in the wilderness—they were kept close, within reach. It had only been his deteriorating health that had earned him a conditional release.
The Russians were watching both men carefully. Housing them in a Moscow facility wasn't casual administration; it was deliberate surveillance. External access was essentially impossible under normal circumstances.
But the Vankos' technical knowledge was exactly what the Brotherhood needed, and globally, that combination of expertise was vanishingly rare. One position, one qualified candidate. The Brotherhood didn't have options to spare.
Bella pulled together the best operatives the Brotherhood could field and began planning a prison break.
With so few combat-capable members remaining, she'd have to lead it herself. She traveled under a false identity to Moscow, accompanied by three others.
The first was Galina Voronina—twenty years old, a Russian assassin who had awakened her ancestral combat memories. She was precise, unsentimental, and wildly effective in a fight.
The second was Shaun Hastings—twenty-two, a male operative whose strengths lay in architectural analysis and operational planning.
The third was Rebecca Crane—twenty-three, a female operative skilled in computer intrusion and possessing a practical background in engineering, formerly an extreme sports enthusiast.
Bella met with them in person, using her real face. She had no plans to announce her identity as Mentor—as far as the three of them knew, they were receiving an assignment from a twenty-year-old American operative who went by the name Daisy Johnson.
The three were young, but young people who'd survived the Purge had done so through extraordinary alertness. They worked out Bella's real identity fairly quickly.
She was well-known. Book tours, press coverage, advertisements—her face wasn't hard to find if you knew where to look. In their minds, "Daisy Johnson" and "Isabella Swan" became effectively the same person.
That she might also be the Brotherhood's new Mentor was a leap too far. They didn't make that leap.
Formally speaking, "Daisy Johnson" was acting on the Mentor's behalf.
Of the four operatives, Bella and Galina were the strongest in direct confrontation. They would go inside. If the scientists cooperated, good. If not, they'd be knocked out and carried. Scientists didn't tend to have many options once a knife appeared. Rebecca provided technical support from the exterior—feed control, cell access, jamming the prison's external communications. Shaun handled extraction logistics and transport; if the primary team ran into serious trouble, he'd come in with heavy weapons.
"Hey, team lead." Rebecca's voice came through the channel.
Bella looked up.
"Someone else is already inside the prison's control system. If I try to assert full control, they'll detect me immediately. How do you want to handle this?"