Chapter 13 Jagger
Chapter Thirteen: Jagger
Jinx arrives at the cabin like a storm front moving through mountains.
I hear the car before I see it, engine growling up the narrow road, tires crunching on gravel and ice.
By the time it pulls into the clearing, I'm already on the porch with my hand on my weapon.
Old habits. Jinx would laugh at me for it, and he does, swinging out of the driver's seat with that manic grin that’s his trademark.
He's dressed in all black, which is unusual for him. Normally he favors chaos in his wardrobe the same way he favors it in everything else. But today he looks sharp. Focused. Ready for something.
"Jag." He spreads his arms wide. "Miss me?"
"You're early."
"I'm always early. Punctuality is a virtue.
" He bounds up the steps and pulls me into a hug before I can protest. Jinx has never respected personal space.
Never respected much of anything, really.
It's what makes him dangerous and also what makes him impossible to stay angry at.
"You look like shit, by the way. Very gaunt. Very haunted. It's a good look on you."
"Thanks."
"Where's the asset I've been hearing so much about?" He releases me and peers past my shoulder into the cabin. "Jace says he's pretty. Is he pretty? I bet he's pretty. You wouldn't break protocol for someone ugly."
"His name is Jonah, Jinx. I’ve told you this already."
Jinx's eyebrows shoot up, disappearing into the wild tangle of his hair. "Oh, this is serious. This is very serious." He claps me on the shoulder, hard enough to sting. "Good for you, brother. It's about time you joined the rest of us in having emotions."
"I've always had emotions."
"You've had uhhh… outbursts that occasionally resembled emotions. Different thing." He pushes past me into the cabin, and I follow, already regretting calling him. But there's no one better in a fight, and what we're planning is definitely going to involve something deadly.
Jonah is in the living room with Jace and Elliot, documents spread across the coffee table, cups of coffee going cold. He looks up when Jinx enters, and I watch his expression cycle through surprise, assessment, and finally amusement.
There's something about the way Jonah reads people. Fast and accurate, the same instincts that made him a good journalist. He looks at Jinx and sees past the chaos to the sharp intelligence underneath.
"You must be the third brother," Jonah says. "The crazy one."
"I prefer 'creatively unhinged.'" Jinx drops onto the couch beside him, sprawling with the easy confidence of someone who's never met a situation he couldn't charm or kill his way out of.
"And you're the journalist who got his brain scrambled and somehow fell for the dick that did it to you. Nice work."
"Fell isn't exactly the word I'd use."
"Crashed into? Collided with? Aggressively pursued despite all common sense?"
"Getting warmer."
Jinx laughs, delighted. The sound bounces off the cabin walls, too loud for the space. Everything about Jinx is too loud, too much, too intense. It's exhausting and also, I have to admit, occasionally refreshing.
"I like him," he announces to the room. "We're keeping him."
"He's not a pet," Jace says mildly from his armchair.
"Everything's a pet if you're determined enough." Jinx turns back to me, and beneath the chaos, his eyes are sharp. Focused. This is the real Jinx, the one that most people don't see until it's too late. "So. Project Omega. We doing this or what?"
The room goes quiet. Elliot sets down his coffee cup. Jace leans forward in his chair. Jonah watches me with those dark, knowing eyes.
This is it. The moment I've been building toward since I found those files in Moore's archive. The moment I stop being a weapon and start being something else.
"We're doing this," I say. "But first, I need to tell you everything."
I stand at the window, looking out at the mountains, and I talk.
I tell them about Moore's archive. The thousands of documents I've spent months unravelling. The financial trails that connect Geneva to Singapore to Buenos Aires to Johannesburg. The shell companies, the wire transfers, the careful layering of money designed to hide what it's funding.
I tell them about Andros and the fertility clinic in the Alps. About the children being manufactured right now, grown in surrogates, designed before conception to be weapons without weakness.
I even tell them about the Pineridge Boys. The cohort that went rogue, that remembered too much and felt too deeply, that turned their training against their masters. The purge that followed. The lesson the Custodians learned: you cannot fully control what you did not create.
And then I tell them about the Harrison Protocol.
"We weren't recruited," I say. My voice is steady. It has to be. "We weren't orphans. We were manufactured. Conceived through controlled breeding programs, gestated by surrogates, designed from the cellular level to be perfect weapons."
Jinx has gone still. That manic energy, that constant motion, has drained away, leaving something cold and focused in its place.
"What are you saying?" he asks.
"Marcus Harrison wasn't our father. He was our handler.
Assigned to oversee our development until we were old enough for Foundry processing.
" I turn to face them. "When he started asking questions, when he started seeing us as more than Silent property, he became a liability.
He died three months later. Training accident. No witnesses."
The silence is loud. I can hear the fire crackling in the hearth, the wind against the windows, my own heartbeat pounding in my ears.
"You're sure about this." Jace's voice is flat. Controlled. The same voice he uses when he's about to kill someone.
"I found the files. Harrison Protocol, Phase One. Three viable subjects." I meet his eyes. "Us, Jace. We were products. Manufactured. Designed."
"And you've known this for how long?"
"Weeks. I was trying to confirm it before I said anything."
"Weeks." Jace stands abruptly, crossing to the window, putting his back to the room. His shoulders are rigid. I can see the tension vibrating through him.
Elliot rises and goes to him, placing a hand on his arm. They don't speak, but something passes between them. Some communication that doesn't need words.
Jinx is still staring at me. His face is unreadable.
"So everything," he says slowly. "Everything they told us. The orphanage. The recruitment. The story about Marcus finding us, saving us, giving us purpose. All of it was a lie."
"Yes."
"We were never saved. We were never chosen. We were built. Like guns. Like knives." His voice rises. "Like fucking furniture."
"Yes."
He's on his feet suddenly, moving toward me, and for a moment I think he's going to hit me. Instead, he stops inches away, his green-gray eyes boring into mine.
"And you're just now telling us this?"
"I was trying to protect you."
"Protect us?" He laughs, harsh and bitter. "From what? The truth? You think the truth is worse than spending thirty years believing a lie?"
"I think the truth is worse than you know.
" I hold his gaze. "I think the truth is that we were designed to be incapable of emotion, incapable of connection, incapable of anything that might make us hesitate when the time came to kill.
And somewhere along the way, that design failed.
We became more than they intended. But knowing that doesn't change what we were made to be. "
"It changes everything."
"Does it?" I gesture at the room. At Jace by the window with Elliot's hand on his arm. At Jonah watching from the couch, quiet and attentive. "You're still you, Jinx. I'm still me. We're still brothers. However we got here, whatever they designed us to be, we can choose to be something else."
Jinx is quiet for a long moment. Then, slowly, the tension drains from his shoulders.
"I hate it when you're right," he mutters.
"I know."
"This doesn't mean I'm not pissed at you."
"I know that too."
He turns away, running a hand through his wild hair. "So what's the plan? We can't just walk into the Ministry and start making accusations. The Custodians will bury us before we get two words out."
"We don't go to the Ministry." I move to the coffee table, to the documents spread across its surface. "We go directly to the source. The Geneva facility. It's the oldest, the source of it all. If we can expose what's happening there, the rest will fall."
"Expose how?" Jace asks, turning from the window. His face is still tight, but he's back in operational mode. The Reaper, looking at angles. "The Custodians control media, law enforcement, government. Any leak gets contained before it spreads."
"Then we don't leak it. We tear it down." I pull up the facility schematics on my tablet. "We go in. We gather evidence. We get the children out. And then we burn it so thoroughly that there's nothing left to cover up."
"That's terrorism," Jonah says quietly.
"That's justice." I meet his eyes. "Those children don't have a voice. They don't even have names, just designations. Someone has to fight for them."
"And we're that someone?"
"We're the only ones who can be. We know how the Foundry works. We know how the Silent operates. We know where the vulnerabilities are because we were designed to exploit them." I set down the tablet. "We were built to be weapons. Fine. Let's be weapons. But let's choose our own targets."
The room is quiet. I watch my brothers process what I'm proposing. Treason. War. The destruction of everything we were raised to protect.
Jinx speaks first. "Fucking hell. Alright, I'm in."
Jace is slower, more measured. He looks at Elliot, a question on his face, Elliot just nods.
"We're in," Jace says. "But we do it smart. No rushing. No unnecessary risks. We plan every step."
"We will." I turn to Jonah. "What about you?"