Chapter 11 #2
Grace set down the mug and straightened. The struggling hacker trying to salvage a disaster. Eight years of practice made the transformation seamless.
“Ready,” she said.
“Walk me through what you found.”
Grace pulled up the drone’s telemetry. Her fingers moved across the keyboard, showing him exactly what she wanted him to see while hiding everything else.
“The alarm triggered at seventeen seconds. The facility’s sensors detected an anomaly in the heat signature pattern.”
“Show me the pattern analysis.”
She complied and watched Rafe’s eyes track across the code, making the connections she’d planted.
“The volcanic venting has a natural fluctuation,” she explained. “Like a pulse. The drone’s heat signature was constant. That’s what triggered the alert.”
“Could you have anticipated that?” Rafe asked.
Grace let herself hesitate. Let them see the self-doubt, the second-guessing.
“The pattern analysis is sophisticated. More advanced than anything we expected. But if I’d done a more thorough analysis...” She trailed off.
Except she had anticipated it. Had known exactly how the system would respond because she’d built it. Had triggered the alarm deliberately at seventeen seconds because that’s how long she’d needed.
She hated how easy it was to lie.
Behind her, Magnus shifted. Grace didn’t turn around. Didn’t want to see what he was thinking.
“Pull up the alarm’s routing path,” Rafe said.
Grace’s fingers paused over the keyboard. This was it. The moment that would sell the entire deception.
She pulled up the code, revealing the routing path she’d constructed years ago.
“There.” Rafe pointed. “That relay node. What is it?”
Grace tilted her head, studying the screen like she was seeing it for the first time. “It looks like a server address.”
“Can you trace it?”
“One second.”
She opened a new terminal and started typing, then an alert popped up on her secondary monitor and froze her hands mid-keystroke.
A live financial transaction. Forty-seven million dollars moving through three shell companies to Dubai.
Arms. A deal that ended with weapons in the hands of people who killed civilians, killed children.
The metadata alone—shipping manifests, buyer identities, delivery coordinates—was enough to stop it. Expose everything. Save lives.
But pulling on that thread would show Rafe she’d been monitoring Lars’s live financial network, would show Lars she’d found his active operations. Would put a target on every person in this room, including Oliver.
Her mouse hovered over the alert. She’d spent years building the monitoring network that had caught this. Years waiting for exactly this kind of intelligence. And now she had to kill it to keep the people she loved safe.
Grace closed the window. The screen went blank, and the deal kept moving—$47 million to Dubai, weapons to killers, lives she’d never save.
She sat with that for exactly three seconds. Then she buried it.
“Grace?” Rafe’s voice cut in. “You still with me?”
She forced herself to refocus. “Sorry. System lag. Running the trace now.”
Her fingers resumed their work, but everything felt mechanical.
You just gave up one of your best weapons. You chose them over the mission. You proved Lars right about being weak.
“The server is registered to the Patroclus facility,” she heard herself say. “But according to the maintenance logs, the physical hardware was decommissioned eight years ago.”
“Eight years,” Rafe repeated. “That’s when you escaped.”
“Yes.” She pulled up maintenance logs, her voice hollow. “The alarm routed through a dead server. It shouldn’t have triggered any physical response.”
“So, we weren’t detected?” Magnus asked quietly.
“We were detected. But not by the guards. By whoever is monitoring through that dead server.” Grace’s throat tightened. “Lars. He watched us. Recorded our approach.”
She was telling the truth and lying simultaneously. Yes, Lars had been watching. But she’d known he would be. Had counted on it.
And now she’d just destroyed proof of his current operations.
“He’s using you as a test run,” Rafe said.
“Or gathering intelligence for his own operations,” Grace agreed. “Either way, we gave him what he wanted.”
The screens continued scrolling, but Grace barely saw them. Her mind was still on that closed window. On the years of planning sacrificed in a single moment.
“At least the dead server bought us time,” Rafe said. “If Lars was the only one watching, the government doesn’t know we’re coming.”
“Small mercies.”
“Run a full diagnostic on our systems. Make sure Lars didn’t leave any surprises.”
“Copy.”
The screen went dark as Rafe signed off.
Grace sat very still after Rafe signed off. Her coffee had gone cold beside the keyboard.
“We got lucky,” she said. “If that alarm had reached actual security...”
“Yeah.” Magnus pushed off the console. “Get some rest if you can. Tomorrow’s going to be worse.”
His footsteps faded down the corridor. The door hissed shut.
Grace waited until she was sure he was gone, then stared at the blank space on her secondary monitor where the alert had been. She’d only glimpsed it for seconds before closing the window, but the information had burned itself into her memory.
It wouldn’t be enough to stop anything, but she’d remember it.
She opened a secure text file and typed two lines.
$47M transfer, 23:47:12 GMT, destination: Dubai
Lars weapons deal—active
That was all she had. All she’d let herself keep.
For three seconds, she stared at the words and let herself see what they meant. The deal would go through. People would die because she had chosen Magnus and Oliver over strangers half a world away.
She did not make peace with it.
She made room for it beside all the other things she would have to answer for if any of them lived long enough for answers to matter.
Then she closed the directory, wiped the access trail, and forced her hands back to work.
Because she could not save everyone.
And tonight, she was done pretending that everyone weighed the same as her son.