A ghost of a smile plays across my lips. "I'll be in touch."
"You better." A pause. "And Jagger? If you find something... if it's bad... you don't have to handle it alone. We're all still brothers. Jace will drop everything for you, you know that. So will I."
"I know."
"Do you? Because sometimes I wonder." His voice softens, just barely. The closest thing to concern Jinx ever lets himself show. "Just don't disappear on us. We've lost enough."
The line goes dead before I can respond.
I set the phone down and turn back to the monitors. The files stare back at me, stubborn and incomplete. Three months of digging, and all I have are shadows. Implications. The sense that something massive is hiding right there, waiting to swallow anyone stupid enough to look too closely.
The Harrison Protocol notation blinks at me from the screen. Three viable subjects.
Jace. Jagger. Jinx.
We are three.
It can’t be…
But can it?
I've always known we were different. The Foundry processes hundreds of children, but we rose faster, performed better, survived longer than anyone else. I assumed it was genetics. Luck. Some combination of factors that made us exceptional.
Now I'm starting to wonder if it was something else entirely.
A notification blinks in the corner of my screen. Asset report. Memory resurgence flagged in a processed informant.
I open it, expecting nothing.
Jonah Doe. Formerly designated Informant-7. Captured three years ago after his investigation got too close to truths we couldn't allow to surface.
I remember him.
I remember sitting across from him in a white room while he screamed.
The report is clean: Routine psychological evaluation revealed unexpected cognitive patterns. Subject displaying signs of memory resurgence inconsistent with chemical processing protocols.
Recommendation: immediate reprocessing or termination.
I read it twice. Three times.
Standard procedure would be to forward this to the appropriate Ministry. Let them handle it. A malfunctioning asset is a liability, and liabilities get eliminated. That's how The Silent has operated for centuries. That's how I've operated for my entire career.
But Jonah Doe wasn't investigating random Silent operations. He was investigating Westpoint Academy. He foundconnections to fertility clinics, to shipping manifests, to the same patterns I've been chasing for three months. He’d been reprogrammed because of what he found.
He found Project Omega.
And now his memories are coming back.
I type a request for transfer before I can second-guess myself. Asset to be relocated to my facility for enhanced evaluation.
His returning memories might contain information I can't find anywhere else. That's the only reason I'm doing this.
The request goes through. Approved within minutes, because I'm Jagger Harrison and people don't question me.
Not yet, anyway.
I spend the rest of the night reviewing his original file. Twenty-seven years old when we took him. Investigative journalist with a reputation for tenacity that bordered on self-destruction. He'd broken stories about corporate corruption, government cover-ups, trafficking networks that operated in plain sight.
