CHAPTER 41
Jameson
Vercors Region, France
Day Twenty-Six Off Grid
The bedroom floor creaked behind me.
I turned from the laptop.
Brynn stood in the doorway wearing my sweatshirt and the jeans she had slept in. Her hair was gathered into a loose knot, and one hand rested against the frame while she tested her weight on the injured ankle.
Her eyes found mine immediately.
There was no confusion in them. No panic.
She looked exhausted, but she looked like herself.
“How long have you been awake?” she asked.
“Several hours.”
She stepped into the small living room and looked around as though she had not seen it the night before. Which, in any meaningful sense, she had not.
The chalet consisted of the bedroom, a narrow kitchen, and the room where I sat beside the stove. Smoke had darkened the exposed beams. The shutters hung crooked over the windows. Damp had warped several of the floorboards enough that each step announced itself.
She moved slowly around the perimeter, her fingertips passing over the back of the second chair and the edge of the uneven table.
“This one doesn’t look like your others,” she said.
“Because this one was my brother’s.”
She stopped. “Oh.”
Her gaze moved through the room again before she nodded.
She looked down at the floorboards. “What happened yesterday?”
I knew what she meant.
“You remember the explosion.”
“And getting into the SUV.” Her fingers curled around the back of a chair. “After that, it’s mostly pieces.”
“We drove south. Your ankle became worse once the adrenaline wore off, so I wrapped it when we stopped for fuel. We changed vehicles before crossing into France.”
Her brow tightened. “We changed vehicles?”
“Yes.”
She hobbled toward the nearest window and pulled the shutter open far enough to look outside. “I don’t remember that.”
“You slept through most of the drive.”
She let the shutter fall back into place. “Did I walk in here?”
“No.”
Her eyes returned to mine, and she cringed.
“You did not recognize the chalet. It frightened you. You stopped outside, so I waited until you were ready to come in.”
The line between her brows deepened. “Hopefully not very long.”
“Eleven minutes.”
She let out a breath and looked away.
“Some of it may come back to you.”
“And if it doesn’t?” she asked.
“Then it doesn’t.”
Her mouth tightened.
“That does not mean anything is wrong with you,” I said. “Your body kept functioning until it no longer needed to. It may take time for the rest to catch up.”
She nodded once, though the uncertainty remained in her face.
Then she crossed the remaining distance between us.
I shifted to stand when her limp worsened.
“Don’t.” She lifted one hand.
“You are injured.”
“I’m walking across a room,” she said.
“You rolled your ankle walking across a clearing.”
“The mountain cheated,” she said.
“The mountain was stationary.”
She stopped beside my chair and looked down at me.
Then she leaned forward and kissed me.
The contact was brief, warm, and deliberate.
Every sequence in my head stopped.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“For getting me here. For taking care of me when I apparently wasn’t very helpful,” she said.
“You do not need to thank me.”
Her mouth tightened slightly, but before she answered, her attention shifted past me.
The softness disappeared from her face.
She leaned closer to the laptop. “Where did you find that?”
I followed her gaze to the symbol on the screen.
Two serpents curved around one another, divided by a narrow vertical line.
I looked back at her. “You recognize it?”
She straightened. “Where are my bags?”
I pointed toward the wall beside the bedroom.
She crossed to them, lowered herself carefully, and pulled open the messenger bag.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“My notebooks.” She removed the first and flipped through it quickly.
When she reached the end, she grabbed another.
“Brynn,” I said.
“Give me a second.” She turned several more pages, stopped, then went backward.
“There.” She returned to the table and placed the open notebook beside the laptop.
A rough drawing filled the lower corner of the page.
Two serpents curved around the same narrow line.
The proportions were imperfect, but the symbol was unmistakable.
I looked at her. “What is this from?”
“The computer screens at the club,” she said.
My attention snapped to the drawing. “Darrow?”
“It was like the desktop wallpaper or something.” She tapped the page. “It stayed in the background while everything else moved over it.”
I brought the image fully onto the screen.
The symbol enlarged, and the two words beneath it became clear.
SERPENS GEMINUS.
Brynn leaned over my shoulder. “That’s what it’s called?”
“Yes.”
She raised an eyebrow. “So what, this is just a fancy logo?”
“We already suspected whatever is behaving like Mirrorstream had a connection to Darrow’s basement, based on what you saw and the way their access systems operated.” I nodded toward her notebook. “But this is the first direct overlap.”
“Because I saw it there.” Her gaze moved between the drawing and the screen.
“Yes,” I said.
“And you found it in the results we pulled,” she said.
“Yes.”
She lowered herself into the chair beside me. “But what is Serpens Geminus?”
“I don’t know yet. A project codename, possibly.”
“Okay, but whoever is working on this likely knew about Mirrorstream and how it worked.” She pointed toward the screen. “Otherwise, that’s a hell of a coincidence.”
“I agree. Either they knew Mirrorstream’s architecture, or they were connected closely enough to understand some of the same principles. The collection patterns are similar. So is the compartmentalization.”
Her brow tightened. “So Darrow is running it.”
“Possibly. Or using it. Testing identities against it. Providing access to it.” I looked at the symbol again. “We do not know whether the club is the source or only one place where Serpens Geminus is being used.”
“But it’s the first place we know exists,” she said.
“Yes.”
Until Brynn opened her notebook, Serpens Geminus had been a designation buried inside the data. No location or person attached to it. Nothing I could physically investigate.
Now it had an address.
She studied my face. “You’re thinking about going back.”
“I am thinking Darrow is the only physical location we can connect directly to Serpens Geminus.”
“That is Jameson for yes,” she said.
I looked from her drawing to the symbol on the screen.
The data could tell me that Serpens Geminus existed.
It could not tell me what it was, who controlled it, or why its architecture resembled something I had destroyed.
Brynn exhaled and looked toward the bags she had barely opened. “Glad I didn’t unpack.”
“Yes.”
Her gaze returned to the screen. “To Geneva.”
“To Darrow.”