Chapter 97: The Breaking Point

The silence inside the Meridian facility was suffocating; only the distant buzz of machines could be heard. Ava moved quickly through the narrow hallways, her heart pounding as she turned off one security system after another. The cold metal walls pressed in around her, and every step felt heavier than the last. Lucas was somewhere in the south wing, taking out the supply caches. Ava’s mind drifted back to him, her chest tightening every minute without hearing from him. The emotional distance between them had grown over the last few weeks, but here in the heart of the enemy’s facility, Ava could feel it more acutely than ever. She was losing him. And the harder she tried to reach him, the further he seemed to slip away. “We’re almost there,” Ava muttered as she reached the central communications hub. The room was filled with rows of servers and high-tech equipment, all humming softly as Meridian’s network buzzed with activity. This was the heart of their logistics operations—the syst