“Jordan,” he says without preamble. “We’ve got a problem.”
I force my voice casual. “Just one?”
He doesn’t smile. “Internal IHC security flagged you.”
My fingers go numb. “Flagged me how?”
He exhales, and the sound is sharp. “They put you on a watchlist. Classified you as an unstable threat actor after your broadcast.”
For a second, the room tilts. Like gravity remembers it can betray me.
“Unstable,” I repeat, and my laugh comes out ugly. “That’s rich, coming from the people who let Yatori exist.”
Clint’s jaw tightens. “They’re spinning it as radicalization. Like you’ve been compromised by Coalition influence.”
“Coalition influence,” I echo, incredulous. “I’m sitting in a crime syndicate’s luxury suite, Clint. If anything I’ve been compromised by overpriced upholstery.”
His eyes flicker, almost a smile, then vanish. “They’re not joking, Jordan.”
Neither am I.
My throat tightens. “So what does that mean? They want to arrest me?”
“They want to contain you,” he says. “And if they can’t contain you…”
He doesn’t finish.
He doesn’t have to.
My skin prickles. I can almost feel invisible eyes turning toward me through the holonet, the way they must have turned toward my parents the day Titanus Vox happened.
“Okay,” I whisper.
Clint leans closer, voice urgent. “Listen to me. You need a dead-drop. You need redundancy. You need?—”
“I’m already doing it,” I cut in, and my voice goes sharper than intended.
His eyebrows lift. “You are?”
I turn my holo projection slightly so he can see the schematic hovering above my table—multiple mirrored storage nodes, encryption layers, release triggers.
“I’m building an evidence vault,” I say, words tumbling now that the dam’s cracked. “Kaijen servers, civilian cloud mirrors, offline fragments in dead storage. And a dead-drop protocol that auto-releases if my biometrics flatline.”
Clint stares, then lets out a slow breath. “Jesus.”
“Yeah,” I say softly. “That’s where I’m at.”
He rubs a hand over his face. “Okay. That’s good. That’s smart. But Jordan?—”
“What?” I snap, panic sharpening. “What now?”
He hesitates. “There’s chatter that they might try to cut a deal. If they can pin everything on you, they keep the institutions clean.”
The words hit like a slap.
I taste bile again. Like Yatori. Like blood in the back of my throat.
“So I’m the scapegoat,” I say, voice flat.
