I shut off the water.
I dress in the clothes Ghost left—soft sweatpants, a Cerberus hoodie that smells like laundry detergent. It swallows me.
I walk out into the main room.
Halo is there. He’s sitting at a glass dining table, surrounded by monitors he’s set up. He looks wrecked. His eyes are red-rimmed, his usual manic energy replaced by a hollow exhaustion.
He looks up as I enter.
“Hey,” he says softly.
“Any word?”
“Still in surgery. Brass says the bullet nicked the iliac crest. Bone fragments. It’s messy, but …” He shrugs. “He’s got the best trauma surgeon money can buy. And Ghost’s money buys a lot.”
I nod. I walk to the window. Seattle glitters below us, a sea of amber lights. Somewhere out there, the world is waking up to the news we broke.
“The broadcast?” I ask.
“It went out,” Halo says. He taps a key. “Every major network. Social media. The kill switch might not have worked, but the signal did. We exposed them.”
He turns a monitor toward me. CNN is running a breaking news banner:MASSIVE DATA LEAK EXPOSES DEFENSE CONSPIRACY.
“Admiral Cole?”
“In custody,” Halo says with a grim satisfaction. “MPs picked him up at his estate an hour ago. The data you pulled… It linked him directly to the assassination orders. He can’t wiggle out of this.”
“And Phoenix?”
Halo’s expression darkens. “That’s the bad news. The system is still online. We hurt it. We blinded it. We exposed its masters. But the code… it adapted. It’s autonomous now. It’s hiding in the distributed cloud, moving too fast to track.”
“We failed.”
“No.” Halo stands. He walks over to me, handing me a mug of coffee. “We didn’t kill the dragon. But we cut off its head. Cole is gone. Reed is in the wind, but he’s burned. Phoenix has no masters now.”
“That makes it more dangerous.”
“Maybe.” Halo sips his coffee. “But we have something else.”
He gestures to the table. “The drive. The one you pulled.”
“The Admiral’s logs?”
“Yeah. I’ve been parsing the hex dumps while you were cleaning up. You were right about the connections. But you missed one.”
I move to the table. The analyst in me wakes up, pushing through the grief. “Show me.”
Halo types a command. A file tree opens.
“This is the Admiral’s private communication node. The one he used to direct Phoenix’s non-corporate assets.” Halo points to a recurring IP address. “He wasn’t just using Phoenix to protect Nexus Holdings. He was renting it out.”
“Renting it?”
“To other players. Mercenary work. Political influence.” Halo highlights a folder. “There’s a massive data packet sent three days ago to a private server in DC.”
“Who owns the server?”
“A law firm,” Halo says. “Specifically, a partner named Cassie Brennan.”
