Page 131 of Operation: Defiance

Asher’s fingers flex against the table. “When I found you, there were two other detainees with active records. One was scheduled for release that day. The other was also trending…positively. If Tessa was sent through Coherent Path, she survived.”

The relief is so sharp, I don’t know what to do with it. Tracing one of the deeper lines in the wood with my index finger, I force my breathing back under control. “When they took me, I didn’t know what I’d done wrong. But I do now.” My throat burns with each word. “I think what happened to me…the missing agents…”

I tug at the neck of the sweatshirt. I can still feel the ties knotted around my throat. The room is too small. Too dark. Too quiet. Even with the music playing and the lights on and Asher next to me.

“Someone at GSD knew if they let me get a handle on the pattern, I’d figure out where it led.”

The words hang in the air between us, and I raise my eyes.

“They needed you stopped. Quietly. So no one would question it.” A muscle in his jaw flexes. “Not removed. Dismantled. Breaking you was only the start. They had to make sure if you survived, no one would ever believe you again.”

My vision tunnels without warning. I drag in a single breath, and the lingering scent of the tea is enough to bring the room back into focus.

Asher doesn’t shift his gaze from my face. “The man I was hired to extract was sent to Northbridge. He spent over a week there before he ended up at Coherent Path. But there’s no transfer order. No money trail. Someone got sloppy. If they hadn’t⁠—”

“You’d have extracted him and I’d be…gone.”

He doesn’t confirm or deny. He doesn’t have to.

I ignore the burn in my throat, swallow hard, and glance at the laptop. “I’m—I want to see it. How they tracked…what they did to me.”

Asher plugs a thumb drive into the computer and opens the main directory. After a few more taps, he withdraws his hands from the keyboard and folds them in front of him. “This is your file.“You’re in control, Raine. The whole time. If you need to stop, we stop.”

Rows of entries fill the screen—columns of numbers and letters that look, at first glance, random and harmless. But they’re too clean. Too organized. My pain reduced to a spreadsheet someone could sort and analyze.

“I can scroll. Or you can,” Asher says. He hasn’t moved. A steady presence at my side.

My fingers tremble. “You…do it. Slowly.”

A small block of nine codes fills the screen, all stamped within fourteen minutes. From the time…

“Intake,” I whisper.

The word tastes wrong—too simple for what it was. My ribs pull tight, a ghost of the first pat-down, the cold air on my skin when they cut everything off me.

My body remembers before my mind does: the hood, the hands, the pressure on injuries they hadn’t even asked about. Being stripped and restrained so efficiently it felt less like processing and more like they were scraping away the parts of me that proved I existed at all.

I steady my breath.

“They moved so fast,” I say quietly, not looking at Asher yet. “Too fast for my brain to keep up. I didn’t understand half of what was happening. Just that every step made me…smaller.”

Asher stays still. Not frozen—anchored. Listening.

“I didn’t know it was only fourteen minutes. How could they do all of that in fourteen minutes?”

He doesn’t answer, but a muscle in his jaw flexes.

Memories from those first few hours hit hard and fast. My back against the cold wall, legs shaking so badly, it was either sit or collapse.

Being herded through corridors, barely able to shuffle with how heavy the restraints were.

“Scroll,” I whisper.

He does.

Another cluster fills the screen. Different codes, different spacing, but close enough together that my stomach clenches and nausea crawls up my throat.

Six hours. Sometime Wednesday night. My mind reaches for order and comes up empty.