"It's the truth. I don't do comfort. I do intel." Jagger zooms in on a section of the schematic. "Entry point is here. Maintenance tunnel that runs beneath the east wing. According to the source, it's used for utilities and waste removal. Minimal traffic, especially at night."
"Source?" I ask. "What source?"
Jagger hesitates. Just for a second, but I catch it.
"Jonah's contact. A journalist who's been investigating the Silent for years. She's been feeding us information since before Geneva, but she only recently got access to this facility."
"How convenient."
"I know how it sounds. But her intel on Geneva was accurate. The children were there, exactly where she said they'd be. They were just moved before we arrived." Jagger's expression is grim. "She's our best lead. We don't have the luxury of being picky."
"Who is she?" Jinx asks. "This journalist."
"Someone who's lost a lot to the Silent. Someone with a personal stake in seeing them burn." Jagger pulls up a photograph. A woman in her forties, sharp features, gray streaking her dark hair. "Her name is irrelevant. What matters is that she's given us a window. Three days from now, there's a scheduled transfer.The children will be moved again, this time to a facility in Buenos Aires. If we don't get them out before then, we lose them."
Three days. That's not much time to plan, prepare, and execute. But it's what we've got.
"There's something else." Jagger's voice drops. "Something the source mentioned that we need to discuss."
The room goes still.
"The facility is being overseen by someone high up in the Silent's hierarchy. Helena Cross."
The name lands like a bomb.
Jace's hand drifts to his knife. Marlee's expression hardens. Jinx goes very, very still.
I'm the only one who doesn't recognize it.
"Who's Helena Cross?"
"The Director of the Ministry of Design," Jace says quietly. His hand hasn't moved from his knife. "She designs the conditioning programs. The psychological techniques they use to break children down and rebuild them into weapons. She developed the methods. Refined them over decades. Every child who came through the Foundry was shaped by her work."
"So then she’s the one who built the Harrison Protocol." Jinx's voice is rough. "The program they used on me and my brothers. The reason we are what we are."
Jesus Christ.
"What do we know about her?" I ask. "Background. Weaknesses. Anything we can use?"
"Former intelligence. MI6 or CIA, depending on who you ask. She disappeared from official records thirty years ago, right around the time the Silent started expanding their operations." Jagger pulls up another image. Grainy, taken from a distance. A woman in a tailored suit, silver hair swept back from a severe face. She's older than I expected. Sixties at least. But she carries herself like a powerhouse. "She's rarely in the field. Usually operates from the shadows, overseeing things from a distance. If she's at this facility in person, it means the children there are important. Valuable enough to warrant her direct attention."
"Or she knows we're coming." Marlee's voice is flat. "Setting another trap. Geneva 2.0."
"Possible. But the source doesn't think so. Cross is a perfectionist. She likes to be hands-on with her most promising subjects. She personally oversees the final stages of conditioning, the ones that lock in the programming and ensure the product is ready for deployment." Jagger's mouth twists on the word product. "The fact that she's there suggests these children are being prepared for something specific. Something big enough to bring her out of hiding."
"All the more reason to get them out." Jinx stands abruptly, the chair scraping against the floor, and paces to the window. The tension in his shoulders could shatter glass. Outside, the farmhouse grounds stretch toward the tree line, peaceful and ordinary, nothing like the violence we're planning. "If Cross is there, we take her too. Or we kill her. Either way, she doesn't walk away from this."
"Jinx, that’s a lot for—" Jagger starts.
"No." Jinx spins, and his eyes are burning with a fury I've rarely seen. "You don't get to tell me to be calm about this. That woman is the reason I spent my childhood being tortured into compliance. She's the reason we can't feel things properly. She's the reason we had to unlearn everything we knew about being human before we could figure out who we actually are. She's a monster, and she's been making monsters for three decades. If there's a chance to end her, I'm taking it."
"I'm not disagreeing." Jagger's voice is steady, calm in the face of his brother's rage. "But we need to be smart. Cross is dangerous. She's survived this long because she's careful, methodical, always three steps ahead. If we go in guns blazing, focused on revenge instead of the mission, we'll get ourselves killed and the kids will still be lost. She'll win."
"So what do you suggest?"
"Primary objective is extraction. Get the children out, get them to safety. If Cross presents an opportunity, we take it. But we don't sacrifice the mission for personal vendettas. We don'tbecome what she made us." Jagger holds Jinx's gaze. "Can you do that? Can you put the kids first?"
The silence stretches. Jinx's jaw works. His hands clench and unclench at his sides, knuckles going white.
