If you want to read 20 Chapters ahead, be sure to check out my Patreon!!!
Go to https://www.patreon.com/Tang12
___________________________
They stood in silence for a moment, the night sounds of Greenetech settling around them. Somewhere above, a Minuteman scout called out a change in watch. A distant dog barked twice, then went silent.
The scene change to the sterile glow of the Institute's overhead lights was a cruel contrast to the soot-stained moonlight back on the surface. Here, the walls were clean. Quiet. Chilled with the artificial hum of regulated air and the near-silent drift of synths along glass-paneled corridors. Nothing smelled of smoke. Nothing bore a scar. But Nora knew better. The rot here was invisible. It hid behind voices too calm, behind smiles too polite, behind minds too brilliant for their own good.
Her boots made no sound as she slipped through the hallway toward the Advanced Systems lab. Even now, with the Council reeling from the Greenetech failure and Ayo busy interrogating data logs for signs of a Minutemen weakness, she didn't allow herself to move recklessly. Surveillance nodes were trickier than people — you couldn't lie to them, couldn't bluff them into looking the other way. But you could fool them, if you knew how.
She passed through an access junction and tapped her wrist console. The feed from the nearest camera blinked out for a few seconds — just enough. She turned left down the hall, past the weapons testing wing, until the reinforced door marked Authorized Personnel Only slid open to greet her.
Dr. Madison Li was waiting, already packing.
"About time," Li muttered, stuffing a drive the size of a cigarette case into her shoulder bag. "You sure the internal motion sensors are looped?"
"I looped them twice," Nora said, stepping inside. "One from the remote relay and one hardwired into the feed itself. If that doesn't hold… well, we'll both be screwed."
"I'd prefer to avoid 'screwed,'" Li muttered, grabbing a handheld scanner and shoving it between two sealed notebooks.
The lab was half-disassembled already. Shelves lay half-bare, terminals still running with stripped-down UI overlays, data bricks blinking low battery warnings. Madison had done well — she'd obeyed the timeline. Three days earlier, Nora had passed her the warning during a staged conversation about power efficiency in the reactor. Two days ago, she'd handed her a data stick with new clearance protocols. And tonight… tonight they ran.
Nora closed the door and stood watch while Madison double-checked her bag. The older woman moved with a stiffness that came from years bent over terminals, not from fear. She wasn't trembling. She wasn't panicked. She was resolute.
"Any problems with the teleport buffer?" Madison asked.
"No. I preprogrammed it with a direct lock to Greenetech's array. They've got enough juice now to catch a beam-in, but we'll only get one chance. Once you're through, the signal lock dies. No backtracking. No breadcrumbs."
Li nodded, slinging the bag over her shoulder. "That's fine. I'm not coming back."
They slipped out of Advanced Systems under a false security overlay that Nora had rewritten to mirror routine diagnostics. For any internal monitor, they looked like nothing more than a couple of system maintenance pulses sweeping the corridor. An illusion. A distraction. A temporary reprieve.
By the time they reached the teleportation chamber, Nora's pulse had quickened.
The room was empty. She had arranged that too — scheduled a disinformation alert in Synth Retention to pull both attendants out. The teleport platform stood waiting in silence, surrounded by pale blue diagnostic readouts and flickering energy stabilizers. The hum in the walls was stronger here, a low-frequency buzz like the breath of a giant machine waiting to exhale.
Madison paused beside the central console. Her hands hovered over the controls for a moment, then began entering the coordinates.
"You said Greenetech's array was operational. They've got stabilization on the arrival point?"
"They do now. Mel patched it in himself." Nora stepped to the opposite side of the terminal, fingers already dancing across her own pad. "You've got ninety seconds before this room pings the system and someone notices."
Li hit enter.
The platform lit up in a blossom of violet light, core emitters beginning to pulse as the sequence built. A pale ring of energy shimmered on the floor, oscillating as the coordinates locked.
"Madison," Nora said, without looking up, "whatever you're taking with you, make sure you're ready to use it."
"I built this damn place," Li said quietly. "I know what they're capable of. I just forgot what I was."
There was something unspoken in that — something that sat heavy in the silence.
Then she stepped onto the pad.
Nora moved fast.
Her fingers dove into the administrative console, bypassing two firewalls with practiced ease, and found the teleportation record node. The log was already updating — timestamp, coordinates, biometric pattern. She erased it mid-stream, injecting a false system ping of an error to block any auto-save redundancies. Then she fragmented the cache — not overwritten, but shattered, scattered across unrelated processes and reflagged as diagnostic waste. The Institute would know someone left. They wouldn't know who, or where.
When she looked up, Madison was gone.
The pad was empty now. The light was fading. Only the faint scent of ozone remained.
She stood there for a moment, heart pounding — not from fear, but from the weight of the decision. From the line she had just crossed one more time. From the knowledge that there would be no going back. Even if she wore the face of loyalty… it was slipping now. And she could feel the eyes tightening.
One of these days, Ayo would catch her scent.
But not tonight.
She turned, slipped back into the hall, and let the door seal behind her with a soft hiss.
Then the scene change to Greenetech, were Robert who was at the tower when the teleport signature flashed.
It was barely more than a ripple on the sensors — a brief energy spike on the lower deck, near the relay pad they'd jury-rigged from Institute tech. His first reaction was a bark of warning, but Sarah was already keying into the local grid, her voice sharp.
"One traveler. Alone. Not armed."
MacCready and three others were there in moments, rifles drawn but held low. They moved as a unit down the corridor to the teleportation chamber — a makeshift room carved from an old biosciences lab, now fitted with cracked Institute plates and salvaged conduit. The pulse of violet energy was still fading when the figure solidified on the pad.
Madison Li blinked under the glow of the overhead lamps. Her coat was scorched at the sleeves. Her face was pale and drawn, but her eyes were firm.
Sarah didn't hesitate. The moment Madison Li's face cleared through the fading static of the relay field, she snapped her fingers toward Robert.
"Call Sico. Now."
Robert was already moving. The walkie on his chest crackled to life as he thumbed the side switch, his voice calm but edged.
"Command, this is Tower. We've got a confirmed arrival — it's Dr. Madison Li. Repeat, Li's here. Send Sico. Now."
MacCready lowered his rifle by a fraction, exchanging a glance with the two Minutemen beside him. The older one, a broad-shouldered man with a bandaged jaw, took a half-step forward.
Sarah's voice cut the air like a blade.
"Don't move. Nobody touches her. Not a step closer. That's an order."
Madison didn't flinch. She stood still on the relay pad, her arms loose at her sides, the faint hum of spent energy still shimmering in the stale air. Her coat hung unevenly, burned at one cuff, and the weight of travel hung on her like invisible lead. But she met Sarah's eyes without flinching. And that was enough.
Sarah nodded once, slowly — not approval, not yet. Just acknowledgement.
The silence in the room grew dense.
Footsteps echoed down the hall three minutes later. Sharp. Determined. Familiar.
Sico entered at a run, coat trailing behind him like a shadow barely keeping pace. His boots hit the cracked tile floor and skidded slightly as he halted at the door, eyes narrowing on Madison, then Sarah.
"You called," he said, breath tight, voice low.
"She's alone. Unarmed. Says nothing yet," Sarah replied. "But she's here. And I didn't want anyone else within ten feet of her until you were."
Sico gave her a tight nod, then turned to Madison. His stance shifted — still alert, still ready for a twist, but less guarded. More measured.
Madison Li stepped down from the platform and stopped two paces away from him. For a moment, they simply stared at each other. No one else spoke.
"I take it you're the one I'm supposed to convince," she said finally.
"I'm the one who needs to know you're serious," Sico replied. "We don't have the luxury of guessing anymore."
Her eyes — tired, intelligent, proud — didn't waver.
"Then let's stop wasting time," she said. "I'm here because I've had enough. The Institute isn't what I believed it was when I joined them. I've watched them manipulate, enslave, rewrite lives without remorse. And I turned a blind eye to all of it — out of fear, out of pride, out of convenience. No more."
"You left a lot behind," Sico said, voice cautious. "That means something. But it doesn't tell me what you want to do now."
Madison's lips pressed into a thin line. She shifted the weight of the bag on her shoulder and gestured to the console still humming behind the relay.
"You saw what they did at Greenetech. They'll do worse next time. You're not dealing with ideologues — you're dealing with engineers who think morality is just an inefficient algorithm. I can help you stop them. But you're going to need more than defenses."
Sico didn't reply. His eyes narrowed, searching her face for a hint of deception.
She sighed — not dramatically, but wearily. Like someone who'd finally stopped pretending to sleep through a storm.
"You want to turn the tide? You need leverage. And the Brotherhood has it."
Sico's expression shifted — a flicker of recognition, of dawning strategy.
"Liberty Prime."
Madison nodded.
"They've been trying to rebuild it since the day they touched down. It's been slow — they don't have full schematics, they don't understand the core logic routines. They're brute-forcing a solution. But I designed those systems. I can finish the job. And more importantly… I can make sure Prime doesn't answer to Maxson."
Sico's voice lowered, but his intensity sharpened.
"You're talking about reprogramming it. Turning their biggest weapon into ours."
"I'm talking about giving the Minutemen a weapon of last resort," Madison said firmly. "One that the Institute will fear. One that could tip the balance if this war escalates — and it will escalate. They've already lost a foothold here. They'll retaliate again. We both know it."
Sico stepped back, ran a hand through his hair, and looked at Sarah. She was listening, arms crossed tight over her chest, lips pressed together.
"She's right," Sarah said. "We've barely buried the dead from the last assault. If we don't get ahead of this, we'll be doing it again next week."
Sico turned back to Madison.
"You realize what you're asking me to sign off on," he said. "You'd have to go undercover. Infiltrate the Brotherhood. They won't trust you — they don't even trust each other half the time."
"They'll trust my credentials," Madison said, voice steady. "They know my name. They know my work. If I offer to help them finish Liberty Prime, they'll jump at the chance. But we'll need to be smart. Controlled data uplinks. Remote taps. Hidden code changes. I'll need Minutemen support on the outside to help disguise what I'm doing."
"And if they catch you?"
"Then I die," she said simply. "But I'm not going to. Because I know that machine better than anyone alive. And I know how to hide what I need until it's too late for them to undo it."
Sico didn't move for several seconds. The weight of it all settled into his chest like a steel block — this was more than just strategy. It was a turning point.
"How long?" he asked.
"Two month, minimum," Madison said. "Longer if they keep pulling engineers off the Prime project for other nonsense. I'll send encoded logs — nothing direct. You'll have to watch for pattern anomalies. Time stamps. I'll teach one of your people what to look for."
Sico took a breath, long and steady, then nodded.
"You'll get what you need. Equipment. Access. And a contact on the inside — someone who'll be your fallback if it goes bad."
"Who?"
"I don't know yet," Sico admitted. "But I'll find them. Someone we can trust. Someone who knows how to disappear when things go wrong."
Madison stepped forward and extended a hand. It was scraped along the knuckles, pale with fatigue, but steady.
Sico took it.
The deal was made.
The days that followed were a whirlwind of activity. Sarah worked late into the nights configuring remote diagnostic taps into the old Institute tech Madison had brought with her. Robert coordinated supply runs to outfit her with tools and surveillance hardware that wouldn't trip Brotherhood scans. Mel rigged a small uplink in the hills overlooking Boston Airport, a line-of-sight relay that would blink every two hours with signal fragments Madison could send from the belly of the beast.
The preparations were meticulous, but they moved with the urgency of people who knew time was not on their side.
Madison Li didn't change her identity. There was no fabricated cover story, no alias, no new name stitched into her clothing or burned into fake credentials. From the start, she'd been adamant about that.
"They already know who I am," she had told Sico plainly on the second night, as they hunched over a reassembled terminal deep in the Greenetech sublevels. "I helped them build Liberty Prime back in D.C., before the collapse. Before I walked away."
Sico glanced over at her, brow furrowed in thought, the amber glow of the terminal flickering across his face. "You mean before the Brotherhood shifted hardline."
Madison gave a tired nod. "Before I realized they'd never see the world the way I do. They cared about control. About preservation of tech through force, not through understanding. When it came to ethics, they had none. The moment I saw what Liberty Prime was really meant to do — not just defend, but dominate — I left. I thought the Institute could be different. I was wrong again."
She let the silence sit there, heavy between them, while her fingers continued dancing over the keyboard, checking checksum sequences on the embedded uplink code.
Sico leaned back against the wall, arms crossed, watching her work. "So the Brotherhood knows you joined the Institute?"
Madison didn't stop typing. "Yes. And they know I'm in the Commonwealth. But here's the thing — they don't know why I left the Institute. They don't know what I've seen. What I've realized. That's the sliver of doubt we use. That's what gets me through their door again."
He didn't press her further. He knew there was a line between useful trust and personal confession, and Madison was already walking it with more bravery than most.
It was Nora who made the next strategic call, pulling Sico and Sarah into a private room near the comms core, a space where the walls were lined with stripped conduits and old relay banks humming with recycled power.
"She's right," Nora said quietly. "The Brotherhood already has records on her. Her face, her credentials, her entire background. Changing her identity now would only make them suspicious. It has to be her — unapologetically her. That's how she gets back in."
Sarah, arms folded tight across her chest, gave a slow, reluctant nod. "They might still shoot her on sight."
"They won't," Nora countered, leaning in. "Maxson may be young, but he's strategic. If Madison walks in and says she's had a change of heart, wants to finish what she started — he'll see the opportunity before the threat. Especially with Liberty Prime involved."
"She's betting her life on that," Sico said.
"We're all betting everything," Nora replied. "The difference is, she knows the game she's playing."
The plan, then, took shape around that brutal truth. Madison Li would not hide. She would walk into the lion's den with her name worn like a banner — a banner of both defiance and surrender, depending on who was watching. The Minutemen would support her in the shadows, not as her shield, but as her contingency.
They rewired an old Institute relay casing to function as a disguised signal masker. Mel did most of the delicate circuitwork, soldering under candlelight while muttering about how insane this whole idea was. But she didn't stop working.
Robert restructured the relay schedule so Madison's outgoing comm fragments would be indistinguishable from ambient Institute artifact noise — a digital ghost floating in the static of the wasteland.
By the fifth night, everything was packed. Madison stood in front of the Minutemen command tent in a Brotherhood-compatible field coat Sarah had unearthed from an old bunker stash. It didn't hide her identity — it just played to the role she'd chosen. A prodigal scientist returning to finish her weapon.
Sico walked with her to the ridge overlooking the city, where a battered motorcycle scavenged from the Quincy ruins waited. It had been cleaned, restored, and given a new power core by the tech team. Fast. Quiet. No tracking chip.
"You'll need to ride the edge of the airport approach zone," he said. "Too close and their sensors pick you up. Too far and they think you're flanking."
Then Madison stepped toward the bike, then paused, glancing back at him. "You ever get the feeling your whole life is just a series of betrayals you haven't made yet?"
He looked at her, eyes steady. "Only when I'm doing the right thing."
She gave a tired smile. Then she climbed on the bike, the engine purred low and steady, and with one last nod, she tore off into the night, her coat snapping behind her like a war banner caught in the wind.
________________________________________________
• Name: Sico
• Stats :
S: 8,44
P: 7,44
E: 8,44
C: 8,44
I: 9,44
A: 7,45
L: 7
• Skills: advance Mechanic, Science, and Shooting skills, intermediate Medical, Hand to Hand Combat, Lockpicking, Hacking, Persuasion, and Drawing Skills
• Inventory: 53.280 caps, 10mm Pistol, 1500 10mm rounds, 22 mole rats meat, 17 mole rats teeth, 1 fragmentation grenade, 6 stimpak, 1 rad x, 6 fusion core, computer blueprint, modern TV blueprint, camera recorder blueprint, 1 set of combat armor, Automatic Assault Rifle, 1.500 5.56mm rounds, power armor T51 blueprint, Electric Motorcycle blueprint, T-45 power armor, Minigun, 1.000 5mm rounds, Cryolator, 200 cryo cell, Machine Gun Turret Mk1 blueprint, electric car blueprint, Kellogg gun, Righteous Authority, Ashmaker, Furious Power Fist, Full set combat armor blueprint, M240 7.62mm machine guns blueprint, Automatic Assault Rifle blueprint, and Humvee blueprint.
• Active Quest:-