“Just my pride,” I snap, then my voice wobbles despite me. “And maybe my ability to pretend this isn’t getting worse.”
Lonari’s eyes soften slightly, and for half a second he looks like he wants to touch my face.
He doesn’t.
Instead, he does something I don’t expect.
He reaches into his coat and pulls out a thin black access token—Kaijen encryption grade, the kind I’ve only seen guards carry. He presses it into my palm.
“Full access,” he says.
I blink. “What?”
“My intel archives,” he says, voice steady. “All of it. Transactions. old ledgers. Nine interactions. Ghostline intercepts. If they’re coming for you, you need to see everything I see.”
My throat tightens.
“That’s… insane,” I whisper.
Lonari’s mouth curves slightly. “Welcome to my life.”
I stare at the token in my hand. It’s warm from his body heat.
He’s trusting me with the syndicate’s secrets.
Not because it’s romantic.
Because it’s strategic.
Because he’s choosing the truth over control.
I swallow hard. “Okay.”
He nods once. “Use it.”
I move past him into the archive room—cold, quiet, lined with sealed servers and encrypted storage stacks. The air smells like coolant and dust. It feels like a vault, like a place where history goes to hide.
I slot the token into the access port.
The archive blooms open in my compad display, thousands of files cascading in organized violence.
I start searching—Nine. tribute. relay access. authorization chains.
My fingers move fast, desperate.
And then I find something that makes my blood go colder than the service tunnels.
A partial alias buried in an old transaction ledger.
Not a name.
A title.
HIGH LANTERN
It appears in authorization lines. In clearance tags. In a pattern that repeats whenever something crosses governments—Alliance, IHC, Coalition. Intergovernmental operations.
My breath catches.
