"You’re a pretty trusting guy."
"Turns out, I had too much faith." Darwin shook his hands out. "By the time I understood what Finch was actually doing, it was too late."
"How?"
"Long story short. I found some things regarding Bralorne Backcountry Protocol." Darwin lowered his chin and peered over his glasses. "The second I saw it, I remembered what you said. So, I dug. Next thing I know, I’m watching Neve’s team get ambushed by a security team that I believe was hyped up on VRK-1 or TITAN."
"Zadie mentioned that."
"I tried to sneak out, but I didn’t leave so gracefully. I snagged my personal laptop and a few other things but ended up running for my life—literally. They were shooting at me." Darwin rubbed a hand over his jaw. His eyes had grown wide, and he spoke so fast it was as if his lips were trying to catch up to his thoughts.
Gideon understood that better than he wanted to admit.
"I called Gus and helped Neve and her team get out, though not without casualties. We’ve been playing defense ever since."
Gideon leaned forward, elbows on his knees. The comms room had grown quiet except for the ventilation system pushing warm air through the vents overhead and the faint electrical tick of a monitor on standby. Three screens on the wall were dark. One displayed a topographical map of what looked like the Harrison Lake region, riddled with annotated handwriting he now recognized as Zadie's.
"If I’d just listened to you—listened to my gut?—"
"We both could've done things differently, but I’m not sure it would’ve changed the outcome," Gideon said. "Finch had us exactly where he wanted us. Isolated. Doubting ourselves. Doubting each other. That's not your fault or mine. It's his. And the only thing I care about right now is making sure he pays for what he’s done to all of us."
Gideon had come to the bunker because Zadie asked and because Darwin needed him. But sitting there, listening to Darwin describe being shot at in a hallway Gideon had walked for years, knowing Kane was recovering from injuries sustained because Finch treated people like lab rats—shifted his anger into something with an edge.
He'd spent two months in the mountains dismantling hardware and calling it justice. This wasn’t about him or what had been taken from him.
Darwin reached across the gap between them and pushed the small box closer to Gideon. "We retrieved these from the field. I need your eyes on them."
Gideon pulled the box toward him and lifted the lid. Inside, nestled in a scrap of cloth, sat a device roughly the size of a large watch face. The housing was matte black—or had been before someone took a torch to it. A thin silicone band, snapped at one end, dangled from the wrist mount.
Beside it, sealed in a small plastic bag, were three adhesive patches. Thin. Translucent. About the size of a large coin. The kind of thing you'd mistake for a nicotine patch or a motion sickness strip.
Gideon picked up the device and turned it over in his fingers. The weight was wrong. Too light for what it would need to contain if it were doing what HELIOS did, but too heavy for a standard consumer fitness tracker. The charging port on the bottom was proprietary—not USB-C, not magnetic, something custom. And the sensor array on the back, the part that would sit against the wrist, had three contact points instead of the two he'd designed into HELIOS.
"What the hell are these?"
"The patches." Darwin pointed. "I believe they could deliver TITAN transdermally. I can't confirm it because those patches have nothing but adhesive on them. But the delivery matrix is consistent with what you'd need for a sustained, low-dose compound release through the skin."
"I thought you abandoned all stuff like that."
"I did. The margin for error of the dosing precision required to administer VKR-1 and KTH-1, in any configuration, through a patch is almost nonexistent. And TITAN is too unstable. But I'm starting to believe Finch considers margins for error to be someone else's problem."
Gideon set the device on the desk and angled the lamp toward it. It was hard to see the circuit board through the melted material. He didn’t want to pry it a part, but he put a little pressure on the weakened side. That granted him a tiny space. "Do you have a magnifying glass?"
"Not in here."
Gideon squinted as he brought the device closer. "It looks like there’s a micro-GPS module, but I can’t tell much else."
"So, you weren’t working on a device like that?"
"This wouldn’t work for what HEILOS was designed for," Gideon said.
"You can tell just by looking at it."
"It's not the same architecture." He tilted the device. "HELIOS transmits through ETHER. Military-grade encryption. Long-range telemetry. That’s it. But it needs to be bigger because of the circuits inside. This thing—" He tapped the section that had been melted. "I’m sure it would transmit through that system no problem. But it looks like there is a Bluetooth component. Like it needs to be paired to a phone."
"Can you get into it?"
"The hardware, maybe. But it’s pretty damaged and melting parts is never good." He turned it again, cataloguing the damage. The outer casing had melted onto solder points of what looked like a memory chip. The battery housing was dented but intact. "The diagnostics I could run offline. Isolated system, no network connection, just voltage and signal mapping to see what the sensors are actually reading, but I couldn’t tell where it goes or even how it’s collecting data." He set it down carefully, as if it might still be listening. "But whatever software ran on this—or needs to be connected to it—not really in my wheelhouse."
