“Markham,” Aaron said over the comm, voice hard. “You don’t get to decide who lives and who dies.”
Markham tipped his head. “I prefer to decide who survives a collapse, Captain. You’d be surprised how many people depend on me making the hard choice.”
Julia’s laugh was a short, ugly thing. “You mean the choice to let a cartel have safe routes while Halcyon profits off war?”
He didn’t flinch. “You don’t understand the scale, Detective.Veridian isn’t about money. It’s about stabilizing chaos. The world is messy. Sometimes the mess needs ordering.”
“By murdering deputies?” I asked.
By the tightness in his jaw, I could see even he knew that sounded bad. But conviction can be a drug. Markham’s eyes flicked away for a heartbeat, and something like regret ghosted the line of his mouth before he smoothed the expression back into placidity.
“You should leave,” he said, personal now. “Before you find something you can’t unsee.”
That was the bait. The threat dressed as a charity. I didn’t take it.
“Not a chance,” Julia said.
He stepped aside and, for the first time since we’d started, I saw movement behind him: a bank of monitors came alive not with code but with faces—men and women in uniforms, in suits, in shadows—people who looked like they had names and houses and kids and also looked comfortable moving ghosts across the world. On one screen, a live feed showed Reese’s last known coordinates—an underwater hatch opening—and a small figure slipping through the darkness. The image skewed, then stabilized on a face I recognized instantly.
Reese, alive. Looking into a camera. Smiling.
“Reese is not our problem tonight,” Markham said, but there was no comfort in his voice. “He’s a symptom. You two are the problem.”
Julia’s rifle tracked his movement. “Then you’ll have to arrest us.” Her voice was ice.
Markham smiled again, but the eyes were tired. “Do you really think that’s an option? Not here. Not tonight.”
Behind him, the server stacks pulsed faster, and the words on one monitor shifted fromIdletoActive: Phase Two.The V emblem glowed on a console like a coiled promise.
I tightened my grip until my knuckles ached. “We shut it down,” I said. “Or we make you shut it down.”
He tilted his head, the faintest amount of pity in his look. “Good luck with that, soldier.”
Then he reached for a switch at the console—not to surrender the servers, but to raise the alarm.
Miles shouted into the feed. “Markham’s rigged the core—protocols you won’t like. He’s warmed a failsafe. Door seals in three—containment protocol engaging.”
The door behind us began to hiss. Hydraulic locks slid into place. The hangar became a sealed egg. The lights dimmed to red.
We’d walked into the nest.
Julia’s hand found mine for an instant, hard and sure. The contact was a simple thing—permission and warning all at once. “Ready?” she mouthed.
I answered with the only thing true: “Always.”
The red glow deepened as the servers spun up. Outside, the automatic defenses that we’d dodged so far came alive with a soft, deadly intelligence. Somewhere above, a motor whined and the outer vents began cycling.
Markham didn’t move. He watched like a man who’d set the theater and then taken his seat. “You should have left,” he said again.
We didn’t. We moved.
25
Julia
The world turned red. Warning lights pulsed like a heartbeat, and the air filled with the low mechanical growl of lockdown. Every vent sealed with a clank of metal. We were trapped inside the Veridian core.
“Hawk—”
