11:35 AM. Day 16.
The north loading dock was a concrete shelf overlooking a frozen courtyard. The snowmobile's engine had died thirty meters back — fuel line frozen, the informant killing the ignition before it stalled. They'd covered the rest on foot, boots breaking through crust ice on every step.
The informant stopped at the edge of the dock. Pointed south.
Jae-min couldn't see clearly. His vision was still the same blurred watercolor. But he didn't need clarity. He needed positions.
The Archbishop's formation sat in the courtyard beyond the south gap — a semicircle of bodies behind a low wall of rubble and frozen debris. Fifteen. Twenty. Maybe more. He couldn't count them. The blur swallowed individual shapes into a single grey mass.
That was the problem.
He couldn't aim at what he couldn't see. Five void tears from rough angles could suppress a formation, but suppressing wasn't killing. To kill the Archbishop, Jae-min needed precision — tears placed not where he guessed the enemy was, but where they actually were. With his vision reduced to smears of light and shadow, guesswork was all he had.
The informant beside him was scanning the courtyard with a calm, methodical gaze. He could see. But what he saw couldn't reach Jae-min fast enough to matter in a firefight. Shouting coordinates through −70°C air while pulling a trigger wasn't a system. It was a prayer.
"Jennifer."
His voice was flat. Not loud. The mind link was still active — thin, brittle, frayed by the cold, but holding. He felt her respond from the junction behind them, her consciousness brushing against his like a radio signal finding its frequency.
"...here. Barely."
"Link me to them."
A pause. The kind of pause that meant she understood what he was asking and was calculating whether she had the strength to do it.
"The Archbishop's people. All of them. I need to feel where they are."
"Jae-min, the link is—"
"I know what it is. Do it."
Three seconds of silence. Then Jennifer's mind shifted.
The connection changed. It had been a thread — thin, one-dimensional, carrying only words and fragments. Now it widened. Stretched. Became something closer to a net thrown over the courtyard beyond the south gap. Jae-min felt her reach outward through the link, past the walls, past the frozen air, past the rubble, and touch the edges of the minds that sat in the formation below.
One. Two. Three. The contacts arrived in his consciousness like pins pressing into a map — small, sharp points of awareness that weren't his. Each one carried a faint psychic residue. Not thoughts. Not images. Just presence. The raw, animal hum of a living mind existing in space.
He felt the Archbishop last. The contact was heavier than the rest. Denser. A mind that radiated the same kinetic pressure Jae-min had been feeling through the air — not just a man, but a force field with a man at the center.
Twenty-three minds. He counted them as they registered. Twenty-three points of light in a dark room, each one fixed to a body he couldn't see with his eyes but could feel with his mind.
Now he knew where they were.
"Got them."
His voice was barely a whisper. Jennifer didn't respond. She was holding the link with both hands, metaphorically speaking — her face against the wall back at the junction, eyes closed, veins at her temples standing out like cables, every ounce of her focus poured into keeping the connection stable while the cold tried to kill it.
Jae-min knelt behind a concrete bollard. His frozen left hand lay useless against his chest. His right hand reached into the void.
The cold hit his fingers first. The void was always cold, but this was different — a deep, biting cold that had seeped into the storage space from the world outside. His fingertips brushed against metal buried somewhere in the darkness.
He pulled. Slow.
The receiver came out first. An M249 SAW — squad automatic weapon, belt-fed, worn steel and scratched polymer. It slid through the tear like a body being pulled from water, inch by inch, weight dragging against the membrane of the void. Jae-min's numb fingers wrapped around the carry handle. He set it on the concrete. Metal rang against frozen surface. The sound carried across the courtyard.
He reached back in.
The void was darker now. His hand searched by feel — cold steel, cold polymer, the familiar geometry of something he'd grabbed on instinct during the warehouse raid and shoved into storage without thinking. His fingers found the barrel. Thick. Heavy. Cold enough to burn.
He pulled. Slow. Deliberate. Five seconds from first contact to full extraction. Set it beside the receiver.
The bipod came next. Smaller. Lighter. His fingers found it immediately — folded, clipped to something he couldn't identify. Pulled it free in two seconds.
Then the ammunition.
His hand disappeared into the void up to the wrist. His fingertips found the steel ammo can. Linked rounds inside — two hundred of them, connected by brass links that clicked faintly as the can shifted. He pulled. The can was heavier than the rest. Eight seconds. Nine. His arm shook. It cleared the threshold and landed on the concrete with a heavy, final thud.
Assembly took everything his numb hands could give. Four tries to seat the barrel. Six for the bipod. The bolt didn't want to lock — internal mechanism partially frozen, lubricant turned to gel. He worked the charging handle three times before it caught. The bolt locked back with a clack that echoed across the courtyard.
The formation registered the sound. Jae-min felt it through Jennifer's link — a ripple of heightened awareness spreading through the twenty-three minds like a stone dropped in still water. They knew.
He didn't care.
Jae-min closed his eyes. The psychic markers floated in his consciousness — twenty-three points of presence arranged in a rough semicircle around a heavy, dense core. The Archbishop at the center. His people fanned out behind the rubble wall. Two on the left flank. Four along the south face. Three behind the Archbishop in a rear guard. The rest clustered in the center.
He knew where every one of them was.
He opened the first tear.
Not where he guessed. Where they were. The void split open directly behind the two minds on the left flank — the tear's edges hovering less than two meters from their positions. Through it, Jae-min could see them. Not with his eyes — his eyes were still useless. With Jennifer's link. Two shapes, the psychic resonance of their bodies matching the physical space the tear had exposed. Close enough to count the frost on their coats.
The second tear opened behind the rear guard. Three minds, the tear placed precisely between them and the Archbishop's back. A kill corridor. Any round that passed through would have nowhere to go but into bodies.
The third and fourth tore open above the cluster at the center — twin overhead tears at different angles, each one angled to intersect the formation from a direction the rubble wall wasn't built to protect against.
The fifth opened directly in front of the Archbishop.
Not beside him. Not near him. Directly in front. The tear hovered three meters from his position, its edges framing his silhouette like a doorway that led to nowhere and everywhere. Through the linked mind, Jae-min felt the Archbishop react — a spike of adrenaline, a pulse of kinetic energy that hit the barrier and made it flare.
The Archbishop's barrier pulsed. Expanded. Tried to cover all five approach vectors.
It couldn't. Not because the angles were clever. Because every tear was placed exactly where a body was. The barrier could deflect projectiles. It couldn't be in five places at once where five people were standing.
Jae-min pulled the trigger.
The M249 roared. Belt-fed rounds tore through the void tears — and through the exit portals he'd torn open behind each one. Each round entered a tear and exited through a corresponding rift placed precisely at the psychic marker Jennifer had given him. The first burst came out behind the left flank at near point-blank range. The two minds there flared — sharp, bright spikes of shock and pain that Jae-min felt through the link — and then went dim. The rounds didn't miss. They couldn't. The exit portal was already on top of the target.
The second burst hit the rear guard. Three minds. Three exits placed between them and the Archbishop. Rounds tore through the gap and found bodies. One mind went dark immediately. The other two flared with pain and scattered — Jae-min felt them move through the link, their positions shifting as they broke from formation.
The third and fourth bursts came from above. Twin rains of brass falling through tears that exited directly over the center cluster. The barrier cracked under the sustained impact from two angles simultaneously. Jae-min felt the Archbishop pour more energy into the defense — the kinetic pulse intensifying, the compressed air layers stacking higher, thicker.
Not enough. The rounds were coming through exit portals placed on the bodies of his own people. Deflecting the projectiles meant deflecting them into the men he was trying to protect.
The Archbishop realized it. Jae-min felt the moment of comprehension through the link — the heavy mind shifting from defense to desperation.
He released a wave of kinetic force. A wall of compressed air that swept outward in all directions, shattered the rubble wall, sent frozen debris flying, knocked his own people off their feet.
Didn't reach the dock. Lost cohesion after fifteen meters.
But the wave disrupted the formation. Bodies scattered. The psychic markers Jae-min had been tracking suddenly shifted — minds moving in panic, breaking the neat semicircle into a chaotic spray of individual points.
Jennifer's voice came through the link. Thin. Strained. A thread of sound barely holding together.
"...losing them. They're breaking. Can't hold the link on moving targets."
She was right. The mind link worked on stationary minds — fixed points of presence she could map and feed to Jae-min. A scattered, panicked formation was noise. Too many moving signals. Too much interference.
But she didn't need to hold all of them.
Just one.
Jae-min felt Jennifer focus. The net contracted. The twenty scattered contacts blurred, faded, became background static. But one mind stayed sharp. One point of presence burned brighter than the rest, dense and heavy and radiating kinetic force like a second heartbeat.
The Archbishop.
He hadn't moved. His people had scattered around him, but he was still standing at the center of the formation, still pouring everything into a barrier that was cracking under the weight of sustained fire from angles it couldn't cover.
Jae-min closed four of the five tears. The void screamed at the compression — five open wounds collapsing to one. The remaining tear hovered directly above the Archbishop's position, near-vertical. Every round from the belt now passed through a single point and exited through a single portal placed exactly on the psychic marker Jennifer was holding in his mind.
The M249 hammered. Two hundred rounds through one hole, one exit, one target.
The Archbishop's shell cracked. Then cracked again. A round hit his shoulder. He staggered. Another hit his thigh. He dropped to one knee.
The kinetic force died with him. Jae-min felt it through the link — the dense, rhythmic pulse that had been radiating from the formation's core simply stopped. Like a heartbeat forgetting to beat.
Jennifer released the link.
The psychic markers vanished from Jae-min's consciousness like lights switching off. Twenty-three minds became zero. The net collapsed. Jennifer's presence faded from his awareness — not gone, but withdrawn, pulled back behind the wall of exhaustion that the sustained link had built.
The silence was enormous.
Jae-min's finger came off the trigger. The bolt locked back on an empty chamber. Two hundred rounds. Twenty-two seconds.
The informant stood three meters behind him. Watching the frozen debris settle over the courtyard. His face was unreadable. But something had shifted in his eyes. Not fear. Not awe. Calculation. The kind a man does when he realizes the person in front of him is something he needs to account for.
Jae-min set the machine gun down on the concrete. The cold reclaimed the dock immediately — the −70°C air rushing back into the space the firing had briefly warmed with sound and heat and violence.
His hands stopped trembling. Not because the cold had numbed them. Because there was nothing left to tremble about.
The informant spoke.
"The barrier's down. The path south is clear."
Jae-min sat against the bollard with his frozen hands in his lap. Let himself breathe for three seconds. Three seconds of nothing.
Then he stood.
"Let's go back."