The door creaks behind me, and I don’t look up, already knowing the weight of the footsteps.
Larkin’s voice cuts through. “We’ve got something.”
She holds a folder like it might save us both, adrenaline bright in her eyes. There’s a tremor under the surface, buried beneath professionalism.
I gesture to the pages spread out on the bed, still holding the headphones against one ear.
“I do too.”
***
I pace the length of the steel table like it might decide to give me answers if I just wear down the floor hard enough. The metal surface is cold under my fingertips every time I pass and drag my hand along the edge, grounding myself in something solid. The static from the radio hums in the background, a low, maddening buzz that crawls up my spine and makes the back of my neck feel tight.
Larkin’s across from me, half-bent over a spread of disorganized files that she’s turning into something resembling order—each one covered in notes, printed transcripts, red markings, and Delilah’s handwriting in the margins like a ghost that keeps brushing against me every time I blink.
It should be enough. It has to be. But it doesn’t feel like it. Not when they’re still out there. Not when I still haven’t heard her voice. Not when I can still see the blood on the last tape they sent, a thin streak in the corner that didn’t belong to King.
“What exactly am I supposed to be listening for here?” I grumble, dragging a hand through my hair as I turn toward the static-filled speaker again. “Because I swear to God, Larkin, if you’re setting me up to hear Santa’s fucking sleigh bells again, I’m retiring and building my own task force.”
Larkin doesn’t look up. Her voice is flat, clipped. “It was one time.”
I smirk bitterly, remembering the moment—fresh-faced recruits, high on adrenaline and ambition, and her swearing she heard ‘magic’ in a transmission. Turned out to be a Russianfrequency jam interfering with the comms, making it sound like bells. I never let her live it down.
She shuffles another file aside, then squints. “I swear I heard something broadcasting out of the Tasmania quadrant. It was faint. But it was something.”
I circle the table, fingers twitching, jaw grinding. My boots echo against the floor as I reach for the radio dial again. “We’ve been chasing shadows for days.”
But then something shifts in my periphery—Larkin, still quietly sliding Delilah’s papers into place, piece by piece, creating a circle from what used to look like nothing more than random scribbles and distracted sketches. I freeze as it takes shape.
It’s a map.
It wasn’t just cluttered thinking or artistic noise. She’d been drawing their movements. Tracing patterns on the backs of reports and lining them up like she didn’t even realize she was building the answer we needed. Or maybe she did. Maybe she knew I’d come in here, desperate enough to look.
I can’t help but hope she did. That it wasn’t a coincidence. That she was leaving me breadcrumbs.
I look back at the radio, still nothing but static and spit, the dial half-broken from how many times we’ve slammed our fists against it. “Nothing’s coming through now…” I murmur, trailing off as I glance back at the drawings.
There—just above one of the shaded towers—numbers. Small, faint, just like the coordinates on outdated Soviet maps.
I stare at them for a long moment, something deep in my chest tightening.
Coordinates?
That’d be the logical conclusion.
But I’ve stopped believing in logic where she’s concerned.
I reach out, twisting the radio dial slowly, lining it up with the numbers etched across the edge of the drawing. The signal pulses, catches—still mostly static but with a crackling beat beneath it. Larkin lifts her head at the same time I freeze, the noise sharpening into voices, rough and foreign.
Russian.
The signal flickers like it’s being pulled through smoke and thunder, but then, like a blade splitting through the fog, the voices land—grainy, low, mocking. They’re laughing.
Then I hear her name.
Delilah.
The words that follow are filth. The kind of shit that makes my vision go red, blood boiling so hard I nearly break the knob off the radio just to silence it. I’ve heard torture. I’ve survived interrogation. But I have never—not once—heard anyone talk about her like that. I feel something primal uncoil in my gut, something worse than rage. It’s personal now. It’s no longer about duty, or rank, or protocol. It’s about her.
