Chapter Seventy-Two
Asher
The scrape of the door opening snaps my thoughts from the endless slow drift isolation has forced them into.
I don’t remember how many times I’ve counted the scratches on the table. Or my own heartbeats. Or the muscle spasms in my arms and shoulders.
The noise resolves into meaning too slowly.
I struggle to lift my head. More than once I’ve nodded off for a minute or two, only to be woken by a guard repositioning me.
I’ve lost count of the number of times they adjusted my position by sliding the rings on the table forward or back.
Once they forced me to stand facing the wall, my wrists cuffed at shoulder height for so long, I was certain my legs would give out.
Raine will have talked to Northbridge by now. I hope.
Mark steps through the door first, Chad close behind him.
My sense of time has flattened into long stretches of pain and brief pauses for questions I don’t answer.
“You look terrible,” Chad says.
Don’t sugarcoat it, asshole.
Mark takes the chair across from me, folding his hands loosely on the table as if this is a business meeting, not the sixth—seventh?—round of the day.
“Shall we try this again?” After a brief pause, he continues, “Tell us where Calder is.”
My throat is dry enough that every swallow hurts. “No.”
Halting his pacing behind me, Chad clamps his hand down on my shoulder, hard. Must be his signature move. I assume it’s meant to be intimidating. Objectively, it’s the best thing that’s happened to that muscle in hours. I keep that observation to myself.
He leans down, his voice sharp in my ear. “You’ve had a lot of time to think about this. Try again.”
I say nothing.
“You’re not doing her any favors, Locke. She needs help. We can get it for her,” Mark adds.
I almost laugh. Their version of help involves massive doses of ECT and an unmarked grave.
Chad moves his hand from my shoulder to the back of my chair, the other dropping to probe the wound in my side. Not hard enough to reopen it, but enough to hurt. “You’ve seen the pattern, Locke. Paranoia, reckless decisions, mistakes that can’t be taken back…”
I don’t dignify their implication with a response. I’m too busy breathing through the pain.
After a short pause, Mark nods.
The two work together, releasing my wrists from the table rings and dragging me to my feet. The edges of the room dim as my blood pressure bottoms out from the sudden change in position. They move me without commentary, dragging me to the wall I’ve been staring at for God knows how long.
“Kneel,” Chad snaps.
“No.”
The position is inevitable. Two of them, one of me. But if I fold on cue, they start to believe their voices are enough to break me.
I won’t give them that.
Mark’s hand drives between my shoulder blades. At the same time, Chad hooks his foot around my ankle and pulls, hard.
My knees hit concrete.
The impact reverberates straight up my spine. I lock my jaw before the pain twists my expression into something they can use.
Working together, they drag me back until my feet are jammed against the wall.
Chad jerks the chain between my wrists forward, then locks it to a ring embedded in the floor in front of me.
It’s far enough away I can’t sit back on my heels, and have to fight gravity and physics not to fall on my face.
“That’s better,” Mark says, his tone as placid as ever.
The position sends a slow wave of fire running down my legs. My muscles are so far past fatigue there’s no buffer between strain and failure. Tremors run through my thighs and into my calves. After a few seconds, they stop pretending to be manageable.
Chad leans against the edge of the table, picks up the tablet, and turns it toward me. “She’s destabilizing, Locke. You know it. We know it.”
Wet pavement and reflected light fill the screen.
My mind is too exhausted for the rest of the image to make any sense at first. But then the video starts to play.
Post Alley opens up into a wash of neon signs against a dark sky.
Then…Raine, phone pressed to her ear, shoulders hiked up against the cold, eyes darting side to side as she scans her surroundings.
My gut twists, the sudden surge of cold adrenaline slicing through the exhaustion. What is she doing out in public? No disguise. Alone. And how did they find her?
She starts to pace, her voice sharp enough that even the tablet’s small speakers can’t hide the urgency in it.
“No. You’re not listening,” she says. “The logs were altered before the request even came in. That doesn’t happen by accident. Someone’s making it look like I did this.”
I force my breathing to slow, painfully aware of how closely Chad and Mark are watching my face.
Raine runs a hand through her hair. “They’ve been surveilling me for years. Every login. Every search. Every time I flagged something and thought no one would care.” Her steps shorten, more frantic now than ever. And I catch the lie.
Raine doesn’t move like that. Not even when she’s spiraling. She stills. She folds inward until the rest of the world disappears. The restless back-and-forth motion in the video isn’t hers.
“Don’t tell me to calm down,” she snaps. “If I disappear before this gets out, you’ll know why!”
The neon glow from one of the bar signs splashes across her hair every time she turns her head, but the light doesn’t settle the way it should.
The ends of her brown locks flicker against the brick, like the image can’t decide where the strands stop and the wall begins.
The same glitch repeats two seconds later.
“Recognize anything?” Chad asks.
“Seattle.” The answer earns me a quick punch to my left shoulder. The gash in my side tears open as the impact twists my torso.
Fuck.
Mark turns in his chair to face me. “This came in about an hour ago. She looks a little stressed, wouldn’t you say?”
I try to shrug, though the cuffs make that difficult. Blood wells hot against the bandage.
The video plays through again. “She’s losing it,” Chad says. “That sort of paranoia won’t play well with the Public Integrity Project.”
“She hates neon.” I keep my gaze on the screen, willing the clock in the left corner to come into focus.
Chad frowns. “What?”
“Messes with the shadows. You should probably fix that.” After another slow breath, the tiny numbers resolve. If they didn’t fuck with the time, it’s a little after ten p.m.
The tremor in my legs gets worse, the muscles misfiring in small, violent pulses I can’t hide. I clench my jaw and ride it out, but my thoughts pay the price. Too hard to control both body and mind at once. Chad notices the strain.
“You’re shaking,” he says.
I don’t care. They’re getting desperate if they’re resorting to AI slop.
Mark pulls a granola bar from his pocket, unwraps it, and takes a bite. Right on schedule. Caloric leverage.
My stomach twists, and it takes me longer than it should to control my reaction.
“We can help you, Locke. Food. Medical care. Hell, maybe even a fresh shirt. That one’s seen better days.”
“The bloodstains give it character. I’ll keep it. Thanks.”
“Let’s say the video isn’t perfect.” Mark rustles the wrapper, but I keep my gaze on the screen.
“That doesn’t change the fact that Calder’s unstable.
She’s broken the law, stolen classified files, and escaped a psychiatric hospital.
We release this, no one’s going to believe a word she says for the rest of her life. ”
Hospital? I almost chuckle.
Chad swipes the screen and a second video starts to play.
This one’s rougher, the image shaking slightly, like someone recorded it from across a room.
Raine sits at a desk, her phone held flat, words tumbling out so quickly, I only catch half of them.
Hidden networks and spies all around her, waiting to strike.
She holds herself perfectly still, which is closer to the real Raine. But not close enough.
Raine leaves space between ideas—little pockets of silence for her to arrange the next thought before she speaks. The woman in the video talks in one long, run-on sentence. And when her phone tilts, the reflection of the overhead lights on the screen is wrong.
“That was a couple of weeks ago.” Chad sets the tablet back on the table. “We’re sending both of these to the Public Integrity Project. Along with a psychological assessment that raises serious concerns about her stability. Anything you want to say about that?”
I lift my gaze slowly. “Send whatever you want.”
His patience snaps. “Pressure like this breaks people, Locke. You know that.”
Mark sets the granola bar on the table, pushes his chair back, and stands. The two men advance on me, Chad unlocking the chain from the floor ring before they haul me to my feet.
My legs almost give out, but I manage to keep myself upright until they drop me back into the chair and secure the cuffs to the table.
“Tell us where she is,” Mark says. “We’ll get her the help she needs.”
“No.”
Chad grabs the back of my neck and shoves me forward. Mark locks the rings as far away from the chair as they can go, forcing my arms almost straight, the cuffs biting into the joints at the base of my thumbs.
By the time they gather their things and slam the door, the tremors have turned into full-on shaking I can’t control. The pain doesn’t matter.
They showed me a fake version of Raine. That means they haven’t found the real one.