For the first time in years, I don’t dream of Syria.
I dream of her.
TWELVE
Talia
PATTERN RECOGNITION
Jackson’s breathingdeepens into the heavy rhythm of true exhaustion. Blood loss and adrenaline crash have finally dragged him under, despite his stubborn refusal to yield.
I watch the rise and fall of his chest, the way his jaw finally unclenches, the hard lines of his face softening in the gloom.
My lips still tingle. A phantom pressure.
The kiss wasn’t the desperate, adrenaline-fueled collision I expected. It was slow. Deliberate. He kissed me as if he were memorizing the data.
You’re fucking fascinating.
Nathan’s voice tries to intrude—you analyze everything instead of feeling it—but Jackson’s words drown him out. The way he looked at me. Like my analytical mind isn’t a bug in the software, but a feature.
I touch my mouth. The scrape of stubble. The heat of his palm cupping my face. How natural it felt to lean into him, to stop thinking and just exist in the sensation.
My thoughts drift to my favorite Jules Verne quote.“Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”
It’s a reminder that failed hypotheses aren’t failures—they’re data points.
Maybe Nathan was a failed hypothesis. Three years of corrupted data proving that model didn’t work.
But Jackson …
Jackson kissed me like I’m a puzzle he wants to solve. Nottoo much. Notexhausting.
Fascinating.
The word loops in my head, foreign and wonderful.
I force myself to turn away. To think beyond the ghost of his touch. We are in an abandoned factory. Phoenix is hunting us. Victor is dead. Morrison is dead. The body count is rising, and I am the only one holding the variable that explains why.
If I can solve for X.
My phone is landfill fodder by now. But Jackson’s go-bag sits by the table, a secure laptop among the contents.
I dig through the bag, past the metallic scent of ammunition and the antiseptic smell of medical supplies. There. A heavy, matte-black unit. Military-grade encryption, triple-authentication protocols.
I crack it open. The screen glows blue in the darkness.
It connects via a secure VPN, routing traffic through servers in three countries before granting me access. I navigate to my cloud backup—the ghost drive no one knows about, the repository I’ve been feeding since I walked out of the FBI.
Eighteen months of corporate risk assessments. Hundreds of companies. Thousands of data points. I uploaded Victor’s data to this secure server before the café.
The pattern is there. It has to be. I just need the right filter.
I start with the epicenter: Victor’s death.Meridian Pharmaceuticals.
Then I layer in Morrison’s “suicide.” He was investigatingVanguard Defense Systems.
I add in the three researchers who died in “accidents.”
