Chapter Thirty-Three #2
“They’re still asleep,” he informs me. “Lila’s with them. Cam’s mainlining coffee and sorting through everything.”
“And Evelyn?” I ask.
A muscle in Sterling’s jaw ticks. “Tapped for a while. Quiet now.”
The image of her downstairs, tapping dots and dashes on a pipe, makes my skin crawl. “Let her talk to herself for a bit.” I expect Sterling to block the doorway when I head for the main room, to wrap me in metaphorical bubble wrap. He doesn’t; he just falls into step beside me.
Cam is hunched over the card table, surrounded by a circle of laptops.
The light from the screens illuminates his face in an unhealthy blue.
There’s a half-finished cup of coffee at his elbow with a new stack of hand-scribbled notes on a legal pad.
He looks up, his gaze giving me a mental check over.
“Color’s better,” he grunts. “You still look like death, but less immediate autopsy, more lingering curse.”
“Feel the love, Cam,” I mutter.
“Love is an inefficient variable,” he says. “Speaking of inefficient variables…” He turns one of the screens toward me, a mess of email headers and routing info. It’s a spiderweb of addresses and timestamps. At the center, highlighted: a series of messages sent from an account tagged.
E.HAWTHORNE
“Her report log,” I whisper out loud.
“This is the address she used to send regular updates. The content's encrypted to hell.”
“Show me.” I lean closer, ignoring the pull in my ribs.
Cam taps a key, and subject lines start to scroll by, some generic, some chillingly specific.
WEEKLY DYAD STATUS – 001A/012B
INCIDENT – SUBJECT 001A UNSANCTIONED CONTACT
ENVIRONMENTAL STRESS TEST – CHARITY GALA
POST-OPERA BEHAVIORAL REPORT
My stomach flips. “She wrote reports on everything.”
“Not everything,” Cam says. “These are the finalized ones that hit the central node. Some drafts were never sent, and that’s where things get interesting.” He pulls up a different window. A folder name is a string of nonsense characters, but inside, the file names are plain.
UNSENT_14, UNSENT_27, UNSENT_PHASE_IV
“Phase IV,” I read, pulse jumping. “What’s Phase IV?”
“Good question,” he says. “Evelyn never got that far in the official log. But she started writing it.” He opens the last unsent file. It’s a text page, partially corrupted. Gaps of gibberish. But the fragments that remain are clear enough.
SUBJECTS RETRIEVED.
BOND APPEARS STABLE UNDER EXTREME STRESSORS.
RECOMMEND PROCEEDING TO PHASE IV PARAMETERS.
My throat goes dry. “Stable, under extreme stressor.” I echo. “That’s the Nesting House.”
“And the opera,” Sterling adds quietly, continuing to list all the things that have happened over the last month. “And the gala. And every time they threw us into a situation and watched to see if we’d still orbit each other.” Cam scrolls further, showing more broken lines. Then, near the bottom.
UNRESOLVED VARIABLE: OFFSPRING POTENTIAL
DATA INCOMPLETE.
“Doesn’t mean anything just yet,” Cam says quickly. “It could be something theoretical or could be some sick long-term plan. The point is, she never hit send on this one. Either she ran out of time, or she changed her mind.”
“Or someone interrupted her,” Sterling says. “Like, say, us blowing up her workplace and dragging her out.”
I can’t tear my eyes away from the word offspring. Evelyn’s voice from last night echoes in my head: They wanted to know if what you feel is inevitable or engineered.
“Phase IV,” I say slowly. “That’s what comes after a stable bond under stress. After retrieval.”
“Yeah,” Cam says. “Best guess? Nesting House was at Phase III. Get you two together, push you, see if you still choose each other. Phase IV is… whatever comes next.” He doesn’t say it, but I can see it in his eyes. Whatever comes next is worse.
My hand finds its way to my lower abdomen without permission, pressing against the ache like I can smother the implications. I force my hands back to my side. “Is there anything about where they do Phase IV?” I ask, my voice is steadier than I feel.
“Not in this file,” Cam says. “But see here?” He points to a header. “She addressed it to the same contact she used for all her other reports.”
“Angelina,” I say.
“Angelina,” he confirms. “If we find her, we find whatever Phase IV is.”
“We burned their lab. We pulled their kids. We took their favorite pair off their board. They’ll either scramble to rebuild or trigger a contingency plan.
Either way, we need to move first.” Sterling says it like it’s simple.
It isn’t, but the certainty in his voice keeps the floor from falling out from under me.
I drag my gaze away from the screen. “Where was the phone?” I ask.
Cam blinks. “What phone?”
“The one she used as the burner. We left one at the abandoned cabin, but there’s no way she could have used that one.” I say. “ She couldn’t send anything from the Nesting House or the cabin. The jammer would’ve blocked it. She said she was sending updates when she got home. Which means…”
“It’s with her things,” Sterling finishes.
Cam frowns in confusion. “We grabbed her and Reyes in a hurry. I only scooped the obvious files and tablets. If she had a phone stashed somewhere in that lab, it’s lost now.”
The realization hits like cold water. “She wouldn’t keep her lifeline at work.
She’d keep it where she thought she was safe.
The Nesting House was where she spent most of her time, but there is no way she was always on-site.
” Some pieces of the puzzle are finally sliding into place—the dates on the logs, the times she checked in.
“She had to have a secondary safe space,” I say.
“Somewhere close enough to make the drive weekly, far enough that the program didn’t officially own it. A motel, a cabin…something.”
Sterling narrows his eyes. “So you’re saying…”
“I’m saying if we find where she slept, we find the main phone,” I say. “And if we find the phone, we get everything she didn’t send.”
Cam’s fingers are already moving. “I can cross-reference the login times with traffic cam data, toll records, rental payments…”
“On no sleep and three cups of coffee,” I say.
“Four,” he corrects. “And you’re one to talk.”
He’s right. I feel better than I did last night, but that’s a low bar.
The ache in my side is a constant hum, the pain in my head a steady throb.
My body is a stitched-together mess of trauma responses and adrenaline.
“One thing at a time,” I hear myself say.
Sterling’s phrase. It tastes different coming from my mouth.
Less like resignation and more like a strategy.
“Step one,” Cam says without looking up. “Find the burner. Step two: find Angelina. Step three, smash Phase IV to pieces before they get a chance to drag you into it.”
“Step three-and-a-half,” Sterling adds. “Kill anyone who tries.”
“Violence as a bullet point,” I say. “How charming.”
He shrugs. “We are who they made us,” he says. “We just don’t work for them anymore.”
I look back at the screen, at the unsent line.
DATA INCOMPLETE.
Good. If they wanted an easy report, they should’ve picked easier subjects.