And I’m not sure I’ll survive it.
CHAPTER 11
JILLIAN
No one says it aloud.
But the fear is everywhere.
It clings to the camp like humidity before a storm—thick, cloying, inescapable. Conversations are shorter now. Eyes dart more. Laughter’s extinct. Even the air tastes different, like copper and ozone. Something bad is coming. We all feel it.
Grady’s voice cuts through the silence like a serrated blade.
“Double patrols! If you’re not on shift, you’re on backup!”
He’s always been a bastard, but now he barks like someone’s lighting a fire under his boots. The marines obey, because they’re trained to, but I see it—the nerves in their fingers, the hesitations in their steps. They’re scared too.
Good.
They should be.
I move through the camp like a ghost. No one stops me. No one talks to me. Maybe they think I’ll snap. Maybe they’re waiting for me to. I don’t care. The only thing I care about is the compad pressing against my hip, hidden in the folds of my field jacket.
Carson’s compad.
I shouldn’t still have it. Technically, it’s evidence. Probably already marked “missing” in the camp logs. But no one’s come looking. Not Grady. Not Ciampa. Not Darwin.
Especially not Darwin.
He doesn’t even meet my eyes anymore. I catch him once, across the mess tent—he flinches when he sees me. Looks down, mutters something to the guy next to him, and slips out before I can cross the floor.
It stings more than it should.
But that’s the thing, right? I’m not even sure if he knew. Carson tried to warn someone. Tried to tell me, maybe. Or Darwin. Or both. But he got dead before any of it mattered.
And now I’m the one holding the pieces.
I spend my nights tucked behind the equipment storage, where the noise of the vents drowns everything else. The compad’s decryption software is old—patched together with half-legal plugins and cracked code. But Carson knew what he was doing. Each layer I peel back is another punch to the gut.
Falsified atmospheric data.
Mineral discovery logs that don’t match the real samples.
Projected budgets based on veins thatdon’t exist.
And worst of all—there’s audio.
I don’t even want to play it again, but I do. I sit there with my back against the rusting frame of a broken rover and press the file open, just to remind myself I didn’t dream it.
Ciampa’s voice. Calm. Measured. Like he’s reading from a goddamn grocery list.
“As long as no one else dies, they’ll keep sending funds.”
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
Just that one sentence, clipped and polished and horrifying.
He knew.
