The city of Manaus glitters far below the glass. Rain has left the skyline glossy, neon pooling in the gutters. In the penthouse above, a party hums like a hive. Laughter, liquor, the soft clink of crystal. Bodyguards drift near the doors, confident and bored. Outside, in a wet alley, a small shadow peels away from a darker cluster of figures and melts into the building like a hand into a glove. Yael moves first. Not loud, not showy, like a blade of focus. At her shoulder is Michelle, a pale notebook in her palm and a voice that will ask the questions once the name is on the table. Aiko moves like a shadow. Liza carries a quiet bag of trinkets and a smile like an innocent child. No radios. No bluster. Yael signals with a finger and they unload into the building. Not a practiced raid, but a silent infiltration: study the sentries, time the pulses. They move like a rumor. Yael slips past a bored guard with the easy confidence of someone who has erased entire signatures from places worse than this. Nobody notices the long shadow in her wake.

  Upstairs, the private study waits. A room of leather and statues, the rich man’s small country. Two guards stand by, totally bored. Yael watches them. They are not stupid, just complacent. She gives a single, almost inaudible signal. Liza - the Poison Ivy works her magic. She gets close to them with her innocent charm and dozes them with her gas. Both fell on the ground unconscious.

  They enter the room. A man stands at the window. He turns around, his expression freezes. He was expecting company, but not this one. The music from below is a faint, steady thing, providing excellent cover.

  Yael’s voice cut clean and low. “We don’t have time for pleasantries.”

  He laughs at first. The arrogant laugh of a rich man, then realizes his laugh has been stolen and replaced with something much colder. Michelle steps forward. “Who sold you the formula?”

  The music swallowed the rest of the conversation. Words vanished into bass and laughter as weapons came into view. Confidence drained from him, drop by drop.

  ***

  The research facility is a noise of explosions, the sky full of smoke and the ground shaking. The Fangs move through it like a storm — efficient, merciless, almost ritualistic. Where the raiders hit, concrete and metal howl and fall. Doors rip, glass shatters and every room becomes a tableau of sudden panic and death.

  Aya grins like a child with a brand-new toy. Her grenade launcher sings and the lab benches erupt into scattered, smoking wreckage. Bottles pop, vials flash in arcs, and what remained of the sloppy chemistry turns into a choking haze. Aya laughs, half triumphant, half feral. Samira is a methodical thunder. She sets charges and steps back; when the circuit bites, storage rooms split open and filing cabinets are turned to confetti. She’s calm, precise, and when the concussive roar ends she’s already moving to the next target. Trella and the strike teams sweep everything, leaving no comfortable corner for the facility’s staff. Men with pistols try to gather themselves and are shredded by controlled bursts and edged work. The compound’s tech racks are pried open, drives are ripped and torched, and the furnace of the Fangs’ fury boils the place down to ash and ruin. They work with a single ugly rhythm: Find,. destroy, move. No prisoners, no mercy. The buildings bend under the onslaught.

  At the far end of the complex, past a service corridor and a collapsed wall, Trella finds a heavy steel door she hadn’t seen on reconnaissance. A different, quieter entrance to something deeper. She gestures with a handsign. Mei-Ling and Katya fall in beside her. Trella rips the lock, shoulder against steel. The door yields with a long, unhappy groan. Inside is a room cooled far below the rest of the facility. Rows of small beds line the walls, each with a thin blanket folded at the foot. The air is clinical and thick with the scent of antiseptic and old refrigeration. Trella’s breath catches.

  On three beds lie girls too young to have been in any sensible war. Faces slack with unconsciousness. Small hands curled by their sides. Their breaths are shallow but unmistakably there. Trella’s hand doesn't tremble when she checks for a pulse, she’s too used to the hard facts of life and death, but when she feels that faint flutter, something unclenches inside her. She looks down at their faces: pale, fragile, cheated of childhood.

  For a second the noise of the massacre outside becomes irrelevant. The rest of the team trickles in. Aya, still smudged with soot and grinning, stops dead. Her grin dies slow, replaced with something that looks a lot like stunned grief. “They’re alive?”

  Around them, the other girls move with that soft, careful urgency that comes when killers meet children. Maya arrives with a small medkit, hands shaking but steady. She checks, records, and then looks up at Trella. “They’re unconscious. Whatever they were injected with, it was either too much or unrefined. But they’re alive. Their vitals are weak, but present.”

  This changes rules in a place where rules have been thin for a long time. Trella turns, her voice hard and absolute. “We′ll evacuate them. Take the girls to the village. Move fast.”

  Nobody argues. A beat. The room is a fragile place of muffled alarms and smoke slither. Aya, who moments before couldn't have cared less about civility, is suddenly gentle. She kneels by a bed and holds a small wrist like a mother. Her fingers are hesitant, unsure how to be kind.

  Outside, Samira slams a final charge that finishes a storage wing; the explosion punctuates the order into action. The strike teams bundle the unconscious children in blankets and move through smoke and ruin like contraband miracles, the rest of the Fangs covering them with a ferocity that makes the ground tremble. Outside the jungle swallows them; the village light waits.

  ***

  The jungle hums. Insects and frogs sing over the steady lap of river water. Boat 2 sits moored at the wooden dock, lanterns swaying faintly. Trella’s unit bursts out of the treeline, boots muddy, weapons slung, carrying three unconscious girls. The youngest dangles limp in Maya’s arms.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  They hurry the bodies onto Boat 2, laying them on makeshift bedding. Aya finds a lantern and lights it, throwing harsh yellow across pale faces.

  Trella snaps open the field radio. “Boat One, respond. We’ve got survivors. Three girls. All unconscious. One is critical.”

  Static crackles, then Milena’s voice comes through, tight, professional, but you can hear the undercurrent of alarm. “Copy. Hold position. We’re ten minutes out.”

  Trella lowers the handset, looking at the barely-breathing youngest girl. “Ten minutes may be too long.”

  Boat 1 finally arrives. Milena leaps ashore and runs straight for Boat 2. The Fangs part for her. She kneels beside the youngest. Her skin is clammy, breaths shallow and ragged.

  “Overdosed,” she muttered. “Massive serum load. Heart won’t hold… not through the night.”

  She draws blood from the twins next, running crude strip tests against lantern light. The results smear red-black, nothing conclusive. She exhales hard through her nose, jaw tight. ”The twins had smaller doses. But this formula? No baseline, no cure. I don’t know what it’ll do to them. I don’t know how to stop it.”

  Silence. The girls around her shift uneasily, even Samira has no quip. Mei-Ling looks at the unconscious twins with clenched fists. Milena snaps louder than she means to, “I can’t fix what I don’t understand!” Her voice echoes off the water, then drops to a hard whisper. “…and I hate being this helpless.”

  The Fangs exchange grim looks. No one interrupts. The jungle presses in around them, heavy and suffocating.

  Yael finally breaks the silence. Her voice is cold steel. “Then we do what we can for tonight. And tomorrow… we will see.”

  ***

  In the early morning the jungle fog still clings low to the river. A fire crackles, its smoke curls into pale sunlight. The Fangs gather for a rough breakfast: black coffee, dried rations. Yael watches Milena sit down across from her — slouched, pale, eyes ringed dark. “You look terrible. Like you’ve aged twenty years overnight.”

  “That sounds about right.” Milena answers.

  Yael studies her for a moment. “How are the patients?”

  Milena sets her mug down. “The youngest one didn’t make it. She passed in her sleep. The other two… still comatose. Critical. I’m getting too old for this.”

  Yael tilts her head, voice sharpened with memory. “Back in the days we buried a lot of kids. Didn’t faze you then. Why now?”

  “Most of the time I was in the lab. Or patching up the ones who made it. I wasn’t playing gravedigger. And the scientists back then… At least they knew what they were doing. These guys?” She snarls softly. “Amateurs. I ran a quick analysis. Their serum looked like it was thrown together with a child’s chemistry set. Contaminated components. Wrong stabilizers, or none at all. Those girls… they suffered.”

  Trella leans in, pragmatic as ever. “Can those components be replaced? Rebuilt?”

  Milena shakes her head. “I don’t know. Maybe I picked up something from Schmidt’s files, but nowhere near enough to recreate the serum itself. I can make supplement serums, yes — but they’re for the newer version. And some of the corrupted compounds overlap. If I try… I could make it worse.”

  Trella’s eyes harden. “Worse than this? If we do nothing, they′ll die. If we try, at least it’s a fighting chance.”

  Aya gestures with her mug. “Can’t you just use part of the supplement? A smaller dose?”

  Milena freezes, staring at her coffee. “…Maybe not such a terrible idea. At this point, it’s hit and miss. I’d have better odds in the sanctuary lab, but they wouldn’t survive the trip.”

  Before anyone can answer, Michelle bursts in from the dock. “Milena! Quickly! One of the girls—she’s seizing!”

  The group rushes in. The twin on the cot thrashes violently, body convulsing. Milena drops to her knees beside her, hands flying with practiced precision. “This isn’t good… Her body’s trying to accept and reject the serum at the same time.”

  She pulls a vial and syringe from her kit. Her voice cracks with urgency. “Now or never…”

  She injects. The seconds drag. Then — the seizing slows… stops. The girl’s breathing evenly. Milena exhales like she’s been underwater too long.

  “What did you give her?” Yael asks.

  “A small dose of the supplement serum… And a trace of pure moonflower extract.”

  Yael narrows her eyes. “But moonflowers are poisonous...”

  “I know. The toxin slows the body’s reaction. Just enough time to reset the system.”

  ***

  Milena sits slumped in a chair by the cots, fighting sleep. Suddenly one of the twins stirs. Eyes flutter open, confused, weak. Milena jolts upright like she’s been shocked. She checks vitals, pupils and pulse. Stable. She breathes out in relief. “…She’s conscious.”

  The girl looks around in panic, muttering in Portuguese, tears slipping. Yael kneels beside her, speaking calm words, reassuring her. The girl remembers nothing. Blank spaces where her pain should be. Milena doesn’t hesitate this time. She prepares another injection for the second twin. Trella watches tensely as the plunger goes down. Minutes stretch… then the second girl breathes evenly, eyelids flickering open. Milena’s hands drop to her lap, trembling. Relief fights exhaustion. “Two miracles in one day. I’ll take it.”

  Yael puts a hand on her shoulder. “They’ll need proper care. You need to take them to the sanctuary.”

  The others nod. For the first time since the morgue discovery, there’s a glimmer of something beyond rage and grief. Hope.

  ***

  The girls pack in a tense rhythm. Both boats idle at the pier, engines heavy with the promise of distance. Crates, satchels and a few last bundles of jungle supplies shift hands. Yael moves among them like stone among water, silent but commanding. She sets down a wooden crate and opens it. The bitter, sharp scent of fresh moonflowers rises. Milena freezes, then takes the crate like it’s a holy relic. Her hands linger on the petals — life and death in equal measure.

  Aya wailed. “Nope. I’m done. Goodbye, cursed boat! Goodbye, haunted seas! I will LIVE HERE with the coconuts!”

  Yael gave her a big headslap. “Aya. Back on board. Now.”

  The crack of Yael’s slap cuts the dock air sharp. Aya freezes, stunned. “Did you just—slap me?”

  “Yes. And I’ll do it again.”

  Samira was already sitting in the boat and calling her softly. “Aya, you’re stalling. Come on.”

  Aya fiercely shakes her head. “You don’t get it. That water wants me. It’s waiting. Next time… I won’t come back up.”

  Trella steps close, her voice low but firm, not mocking. “You survived. We pulled you back once. We’ll do it again if we have to. But you’re not dying here, Aya. You’re coming home.”

  She looks at the boat like it’s a gallows.

  Michelle comes over trying to calm her down with her soft voice. “Aya. You’ve fought worse enemies than water. Don’t let fear win this battle. Not here. Not now.”

  Aya’s lip trembles for just a heartbeat, but she covers it with a scowl. She stomps toward the boat.

  “We’re packed. Time to move,” Trella said.

  The team gathers at the boats. For a moment, they wait. Yael stands tall on the dock, arms behind her back, face unreadable. A murmur of surprise moves through the girls as realization dawns: she isn’t coming.

  “I’ll stay. Guard what’s left. The flowers, the ruins, the silence. Mossad taught me to finish what others start. No one comes here again.”

  “Then… This is goodbye?” Michelle asks quietly.

  Yael doesn't answer. Instead inclines her head. A sign of respect from one soldier to another.