Chapter 172: The Only Number That Mattered

The tower was quiet, for once.

Not silent. The crumbling building never gave him that.

There was always pipes cracking under pressure and ice. Wires hummed in the stairwell like a plucked string, powered by very sketchy sources that could backfire in a moment. Somewhere below, a baby cried once, cut off sharp by a mother’s hand, not wanting to call attention to either one of them.

But the usual clatter.... the arguments over rations, the sewing needles scraping through tarp, the hammer blows echoing like gunfire... those had gone still.

The air was thin enough to breathe without tasting smoke.

Noah took the chance.

He left Roane watching the seventeenth floor and slipped up two more flights, his boots rolling across concrete as if he had always belonged here.

The corridor on the nineteenth leaned worse than most, the floor tilted enough that loose things slid to the far wall and stayed there. That was why no one used the old storage room at the end. The door stuck, the floor listed, the ceiling wept frost.

To everyone else it was wasted space.

But to Noah, it was sanctuary.

He eased the door open with his shoulder and pulled it shut again until the latch gently caught.

The air inside was colder than the hall, sharp in his lungs, glittering faintly with frost. He crossed to the corner where a vent sat half-buried in rust and bent down. The grate came off only for him, warmed loose by his hands until the metal softened.

The sat phone waited inside.

Wrapped in cloth. Bound in wire. Hidden where no one would ever think to look.

He drew it out like a relic from a shrine.

The bundle weighed almost nothing, but his hands treated it like treasure. He unwound the cloth and stared at the ugly square shape that emerged. It wasn’t worth anything to anyone else. The casing was scratched, the screen was cracked, it was an old military model built for function and nothing else.

But to Noah, this was the only thing in the world that mattered.

The only number saved in its memory: Dr. Leyla Orhan.

He didn’t power it on.

He never did after the ice came.

He held it between both palms, letting the cold bite through his skin until he warmed it. Heat bled into the plastic. Frost melted and ran. The phone looked almost alive again, the way it had the first night he’d dared to use it.

That night came back to him in jagged pieces.

The tsunami. The crash. His lungs clawing for air while the city drowned. He had stumbled up the tower stairs half-dead and pulled the phone out because there had been nothing else left that belonged to him. He’d pressed the button, heart hammering, and listened to the static until it cleared.

Her voice had answered.

"Report."

There was no greeting. No name. No concern for the state he was in. Just one word, sharp and clean, as if she had been waiting for him.

He had given her what she wanted.

"A tsunami hit the east coast. City H is completely wiped out. Anything under the 20 stories is completely gone. I don’t know who survived and who didn’t."

She hadn’t asked about him. She had asked about numbers. Casualties. Survivors. Infrastructure.

And finally: "The four. Do you see them?"

The four. KAS.

Her tone had changed when she spoke of them. Tighter. Hungrier. She wanted every detail. How they had reacted when the mutations appeared. Whether the cold touched them, whether their breath froze in the winter air like anyone else’s. What they looked like, how they acted.

Noah had told her what he’d seen before the tsunami hit. But he had yet to tell her that he saw them crossing the ice. That the cold that killed so many people hadn’t so much as touch them. That they had looked like men on a training exercise, not survivors on the edge of death.

As much as he wanted to call her and tell her all that. He didn’t.

He still remembered what she had told him after he explained what happened. Her voice was as precise as always: "You need to bring them back to me. Alive if possible. Proof of life if not. Heads, Noah. Nothing else will convince me of their death."

He had clutched the phone tighter, the word heads ringing in his bones. He understood. She wanted certainty. She wanted them delivered if he could, studied if they lived. But if they didn’t — if he failed — then she wanted the kind of proof no one could deny.

Heads.

She hadn’t said his name when she gave the order. She never did.

But he told himself it meant something all the same.

Now, crouched on the slanted floor of his hidden room, Noah stared at the phone and let memory gnaw at him. Every time he called her since she had brought him over from Country A the pattern was the same.

She wanted KAS.

She wanted reports.

She wanted details about them.

Not him. Never him.

He hated them for it.

He hated the way her voice sharpened when he described Zubair’s stride or Alexei’s steadiness or Elias’s control under stress. He hated the way she lingered on Lachlan’s name like it was a key she’d been waiting for. He hated that the men who had followed Sera into that gleaming tower across the ice were the ones she wanted to hear about, not the man who had clawed his way up twenty flights of drowning concrete just to survive.

But still — he convinced himself it was love.

What else could it be? She had given him her personal number.

The only number.

She had trusted him with it. She had answered, every time. She hadn’t wasted words, hadn’t softened her tone, but that was who she was. Cold, precise, brilliant. She didn’t say his name because she didn’t need to.

She didn’t waste affection on anyone because he was the only one who mattered.

The jealousy burned hotter than the fire in his hands.

Because he knew the truth.

She didn’t even think about him unless he had something to give her. And the only thing she wanted was them.

KAS.

The only reason she would ever answer.

So, he had to be careful.

Always so careful.

The phone stayed off. Always. He didn’t dare leave it powered on, not for an hour, not for a minute longer than it took to report. Every second was a risk. Batteries didn’t last forever. He cranked the generator in secret, just enough to keep it alive. He guarded it more fiercely than rations. 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

He couldn’t call her until he had something to give.

And the only thing worth giving was KAS.

His thumb hovered over the button now. He could almost hear her already, her voice clean through static, asking again about the four. Never about him.

He wanted to press it just to hear her. Just to let her voice fill the silence and cut through the loneliness of this leaning tomb. But he couldn’t. Not without proof. Not without something about them.

She had made that clear.

And so he sat there in the cold room, holding the phone like it was her hand, jealousy and longing tangled into a knot he couldn’t cut. He hated KAS for being the measure of his worth. He hated that her attention belonged to them. But he loved her all the same, with a devotion so sharp it bled.

One day, he promised himself, he would bring them to her. Alive if he could, their blood and secrets intact. Dead if he must, their heads heavy in his hands. Either way, he would give her what she wanted.

And then she would have to see him.

Noah leaned his head against the wall for a moment, his eyes closed, the cold seeping into his skin.

He saw her face in memory — not soft, never soft, but sharp and brilliant, her eyes narrowed on some thought no one else could follow. He imagined what it would be like if she looked at him that way.

Just once.

He stood. Straightened his shoulders.

Tomorrow he would lead the first tarp out onto the ice. Tomorrow he would take the first step closer.

And when he finally called her again, it would not be with scraps. It would be with proof.

"I’ll bring you what you want," he murmured into the cold. "Even if it kills them. Even if it kills me."

The vent hid his secret again. The hall outside hummed with low voices. Somewhere below, a door banged once against its frame. Noah left the room with the vow burning in his chest.

Across the tundra, the casino tower stood clean and upright, full of food, fire, and men who didn’t deserve her attention.

But he would change that.