“You’re serious.”
“As a minefire.”
“You’d hand me over for your own protection.”
He shrugs. “It’s poetic, isn’t it? They erase you. I profit. Everybody wins.”
I don’t blink.
Not when he says it. Not when he smiles that same sideways smile like the war never ended for him—just changed uniforms.
He thinks I’ll scream. Lash out. Try to guilt him back into humanity.
But I don’t.
I stay still.
Stillness is a weapon if you hold it long enough.
And I’ve held it a long damn time.
I tilt my head, just slightly, and meet his eyes.
“What’s in it for me?” I ask.
Jax chuckles—low and smooth. “Same as always. You get to play the martyr. That’s your thing, isn’t it?”
I don’t rise to it.
He’s baiting me. Looking for a crack.
I let the silence sit.
After a beat, he pats the inside of his coat again, deliberately slow. “You want to see it?”
My nod is a single jerk.
He pulls the lining apart with a practiced flick. The crystal’s embedded deep in the inner seam—thin, nearly invisible except for the faint shimmer of its micro-etching. Like a sliver of frozen breath.
He slides it free between two fingers and holds it up, catching the distant starlight through the room.
I step forward.
Close enough to see the imprint on the edge: a tiny, flickering set of characters that don’t exist in any formal system. Ghost code. Dead languages. Obol’s deepest encryption layer.
This is it.
The override key.
“You’re lucky I still trust you,” Jax says, smirking.
I take the crystal from his fingers.
“I know,” I say.
Then I stun him.
It’s clean.
