Chapter 25
Travis
The intercepts kept scrolling, and none of them told us anything we didn’t already know. That had been true for days now.
The control room was humming, the feeds were cycling, Sera was at her workstation and I was at mine, and the data moved between us the way it always moved between us. But the engine underneath had seized. We were generating intelligence we couldn’t act on, mapping a network we couldn’t touch, building a case with nowhere to take it.
The Ghost was currently grounded. We both knew it. The wound along my ribs was still healing, the FBI was hunting for the source of the disruptions, and Kindt’s people were narrowing their profile with every data point I’d already given them. Going out again was a conversation neither of us had started because neither of us knew how to finish it.
In the meantime… children were out there on their own.
Sera had stopped refining the existing model. She’d been tearing through the full data set, every unfiltered interceptand operational log I’d given her access to, pulling everything onto her screens and reorganizing it in configurations I didn’t recognize.
She wasn’t maintaining. She was hunting.
She hadn’t told me what she was looking for. I hadn’t asked, because I’d learned that Sera deep in a problem was Sera best left alone until she surfaced. Interrupting her mid-process was like pulling a thread before the knot was tied.
But I was aware of the silence. Her usual questions and observations had gone quiet over the past few hours. She was locked in, her focus narrowed to whatever was assembling itself behind her eyes.
Then she sat forward in her chair. A small movement that changed the whole room.
“Travis. Pull up the full corridor map. All eighteen months. Every route.”
I put it on the main screen. A web of lines and nodes stretching across western Montana from the southern corridor to the northern border. Every courier path I’d tracked. Every waypoint I’d flagged.
“Now overlay my model’s predicted routes from the same period.”
I did. Her projections layered over my data, matching at most of the nodes, diverging at the margins where her predictions hadn’t yet been validated.
“See the overlap,” she said. “But look at the gap.”
She stood up and walked to the main screen. Her finger traced a circle around an area east of Missoula. “Every route goes around this zone. Not one courier path crosses through it. Eighteen months of data, and there’s a hole.”
I looked at it. I’d looked at it before. Hundreds of times, in fact, in all the months I’d been inside this data alone. I’d noticed the anomaly. Logged it. Flagged it as a potential dead zone inKindt’s logistics and moved on, because I’d been focused on the routes themselves, on the movement, on the next transport I could intercept.
I’d never asked the right question about it. I’d never asked why it was empty.
“They don’t go around it by accident,” Sera said. “The deviation costs them hours on some of these routes. There’s no geographic reason for it. No law enforcement facility, no military installation, nothing that would justify a detour of that size.”
“So what do you think it is?”
She turned to face me. “I think it’s the key to everything. I think Kindt is protecting what matters by staying away from it. Whatever he’s running in that corridor, the hub is in the hole.”
The weight of it hit me in the chest. A sick, lurching sensation that had nothing to do with my healing ribs.
I’d been tracking every courier, every route, every node for as long as the Ghost had existed. And the most important thing on the map was the place where there was nothing. Every route bending around the same empty space.
I’d been staring at the water. She’d seen the rock.
“That’s good,” I said. The understatement of my entire life.
“If it’s right. At the very least it’s a starting point for stopping Kindt for good. But we need to confirm what’s in that zone, so we know for sure.”
“Maude. The gap zone Sera identified. Pull everything you can find. Property records, utility consumption, satellite imagery, county filings. Anything that tells us what’s in that space.”
“Already running. I started when she stood up.”
Sera glanced at the ceiling. “You knew what I was going to find?”
