Chapter 27
MIA
Dreamt about you last night. Woke up hard.
I keep staring at that last text message from Nate.
We haven’t seen each other since Montana—he’s been swamped with disaster relief, public appearances, company meetings, all of it penance for disappearing.
As for me, I’ve been busy meeting with Bayo and Kat, gathering more intel and trying to keep Nate off my mind, though I keep failing spectacularly.
Please come over tonight? he’d texted this morning. Danny can pick you up. I’ll cook. I promise more cheese.
I’d typed back that I had writing to do. Which is true, just not the whole truth.
The whole truth is that I need distance, need to remember why I’m here, what the mission actually is, who I’m supposed to be.
In Montana, with his childhood and his secrets spread out before me, I forgot.
I let myself pretend I was just a woman falling for a man.
Let myself believe the lie I’ve been selling.
I’m starting to love that lie.
My phone buzzes. Bayo.
Contact confirmed. Tonight, 9 p.m. Dead zone. Bring Kat.
I delete the message and reach for my laptop.
Time to remember who I really am.
The subway platform at Jay Street–MetroTech is thick with rush-hour bodies, the air heavy with exhaust and sweat and the particular dampness of underground spaces.
I spot Kat near the far end, leaning against a pillar, her camera bag slung across her chest, looking like every other freelance photographer in Brooklyn—tired, underfed, and vaguely artistic.
She falls into step beside me without acknowledgment. We board the A train heading toward Hoyt-Schermerhorn. It takes three stops and two transfers, a deliberately circuitous route designed to shake any tails, human or digital.
Or invisible, I think.
“You’re quiet,” Kat says finally, her voice low enough to be swallowed by the rattle of the train.
“Just thinking.”
“About the target?”
I don’t answer.
She studies my profile for a moment, and I’m afraid she sees all. “You’ve gone soft, haven’t you?”
“I haven’t gone anything.”
“Mia...” she says in a warning tone. “I’ve known you for six years. I can see it. The way you check your phone. The faraway look in your eyes. The way you say his name.”
“I don’t say his name in any particular way.”
“You say it like it means something. Something more than it should.”
The train lurches around a curve. A twenty-something with oversized headphones stumbles against me and mumbles an apology. I wait until he’s moved away before responding, barely moving my mouth as I speak.
“And I’m telling you, it doesn’t.”
Kat doesn’t push. That’s one of the things I’ve always appreciated about her.
She knows when to press and when to let the silence do the work.
We ride the rest of the way without speaking, transferring twice more until we emerge in a part of Brooklyn I don’t recognize, the kind of neighborhood that gentrification forgot, filled with industrial buildings and empty lots.
“This way,” Kat says, leading me down a side street.
The building we stop at looks abandoned, with graffiti on the walls, plywood over the windows, and a chain-link fence with a gap just wide enough to slip through.
But when Kat pushes open a rusted door at the back, the interior tells a different story.
Here, it already feels lived in, with stairs leading downward and emergency lights that cast everything in red, giving it an eerie glow.
“Dead zone’s in the basement,” she says. “Bayo’s contact runs it. Former NSA analyst who found religion after the Dark Decade. Now, she helps people disappear.”
We descend three flights into a space that feels carved out of the Earth itself, with low ceilings, concrete walls, and the particular silence of a place where signals go to die.
No data hum or electromagnetic buzz here.
My phone went dark the moment we crossed the threshold, making me feel both on edge (because who are we without our phones?) and secure at the same time.
The room is larger than I expected. Maybe a dozen people are scattered throughout, most of them at individual workstations surrounded by lead-lined privacy screens.
The fashion is striking—colored sunglasses, nanotech makeup that blurs facial features, hats and hoods and carefully styled hair designed to defeat recognition algorithms. It’s like a costume party for the surveilled.
“Counter-surveillance chic,” Kat murmurs. “Very underground Brooklyn.”
A woman approaches us—mid-sixties maybe, close-cropped grey hair. She seems kind of featureless in a strange way, and my memory is trying hard to latch on to something to remember for the future. “You’re Bayo’s friends.”
“That’s right.”
“Call me Evil-Lyn. This way.”
“Evil-Lyn, like from He-Man?” I ask.
She gives me a quick smile but doesn’t say anything.
She leads us to a corner booth enclosed by more lead-lined panels and gestures for us to sit.
“There are some ground rules. No recording devices. No real names unless absolutely necessary, pseudonyms preferred. Payment was already handled through your mutual friend. You have thirty minutes.”
Then, Evil-Lyn is gone, and we’re alone with our contact.
He’s younger than I expected, maybe mid- to late-twenties, with the hollow cheeks and darting eyes of someone who hasn’t slept properly in months. His skinny hands shake slightly as he pulls a tablet from his bag, the screen protected by a film that makes it visible only from directly in front.
“You’re looking into Global Dynamix,” he states.
“We’re looking into a lot of things,” I say.
“Don’t bullshit me.” My eyes widen at his unhinged tone. “Bayo said you wanted the Kozlov connection. I have it. But once I give it to you, I’m gone. New identity, new continent. This information has a body count, and I don’t plan on adding to it.”
Kat and I exchange a glance. Okaaaaay.
“We’re listening,” I say, trying to sound reassuring.
He makes a huffing sound then swipes through several screens, angling the tablet so we can see. There are financial records, shell companies, transfer logs that look like hieroglyphics until he starts translating.
“Viktor Kozlov has been trafficking people for decades. Eastern European refugees, mostly from the battle of Ukraine. Women and children. History keeps repeating itself, doesn’t it?” His voice is flat, clinical. “What you don’t know is where some of those people end up.”
“And where is that?”
“Global Dynamix research facilities. Three of them. One outside Seattle, one in Jersey, and one that moves.”
My stomach drops. “So they are buying trafficked people…”
We suspected as much, but still, to hear it like this…
“Not buying. Receiving. As payment. Kozlov supplies test subjects for a program called Project Prometheus. In exchange, Global Dynamix looks the other way on his other operations and provides certain, shall we say, technological assistance.”
“Test subjects for what?” Kat asks.
The man hesitates, licks his lips. “There was an analyst. Indian guy, worked for Global Dynamix’s internal security division. He started asking questions about discrepancies in the research logs. Missing subjects, falsified death certificates, that kind of thing.”
“Kapoor,” I say absently. “Raj Kapoor.”
His eyes widen slightly. “You know about him?”
“We know he disappeared,” I say cautiously, not about to out one of our assets, even though he’s most likely dead.
“Disappeared is one word for it.” He swipes to another screen, a document heavily redacted but still legible in places. “Before he vanished, Kapoor managed to get a copy of the Prometheus project brief to a friend outside the company. I’m that friend.”
He turns the tablet toward us.
I read the visible text once. Twice. A third time, because my brain keeps rejecting what my eyes are seeing.
…consciousness transfer protocol…successful integration of human neural patterns into synthetic substrate…mortality rate of source subjects: 100%…ethical classification: N/A per executive override…
“They’re putting people’s minds into machines,” I say slowly. “And killing them in the process.”
“Not just people. Specific people. The trafficking victims are expendable to them; ergo, they are test subjects—they refine the process on them, figure out what works and what doesn’t.
Turns out, there’s a lot that doesn’t work.
” He pauses. “But that’s not the end goal.
The end goal is someone important, someone valuable enough to justify the body count. ”
I go still.
“Do you know what that end goal is?” I ask carefully.
“Not completely, but I have a theory.” He swipes to another screen, schematics this time, technical drawings that look like anatomical diagrams crossed with circuit boards.
“The consciousness transfer process has a near-total mortality rate for the source subjects. The trafficking victims are disposable—they use them to refine the process, figure out what works—but the ultimate goal isn’t just to transfer minds. It’s to replicate them.”
“Replicate how?”
“Imagine a soldier who can’t die, who can be rebuilt if damaged, copied if destroyed. An army of perfect weapons with human intelligence but none of human weaknesses.” He taps the screen.
“They want to build an army? Like a robot army?” I say in disbelief.
“It’s not just a want. I believe they’re already doing it. I think they’ve moved onto that next stage, and if they haven’t, they will soon.”
“But why bother with human consciousness at all?” I ask. “Why not just build robots? Program them from scratch?”