Chapter 39 Ronan
Ronan
Location: Mobile Command
Time: Afternoon
My screens explode.
Not alerts.
Not noise.
A flood.
Uncontrolled.
Unfiltered.
“Holy—” I whisper.
Aaron’s voice cuts in immediately. “What?”
I’m already pulling the feed apart, isolating the source, tracking the spread.
“They just dumped a list,” I say. “Anonymous release. Wide distribution.”
“Of what?”
I hesitate.
Because the answer matters.
“Targets.”
The word lands heavy.
I expand the list across three monitors.
Names.
Dozens at first.
Then hundreds.
Then more.
Political figures.
CEOs.
Judges.
Military officers.
Across six countries.
No pattern on the surface.
But that’s the point.
“And they’re saying,” I continue, voice tightening, “that Lark’s system generated it.”
Silence.
Then—
“That’s not possible,” Aaron says.
“No,” I agree. “But it doesn’t have to be.”
Because perception—
Perception is already moving.
My stomach sinks as I watch the coverage spike.
Panels lighting up.
Experts speculating.
Agencies reacting.
“They’re creating panic,” I say. “And using her name to validate it.”
“And justify emergency powers,” Aaron adds.
“Yes.”
That’s the play.
Fear → urgency → control.
I zoom in.
Closer.
Closer.
There.
Something’s off.
A pattern.
But not the right one.
“Oh no…”
“What?” Aaron snaps.
I isolate a subset of names and overlay it with known behavioral markers.
It doesn’t align.
Not cleanly.
Not precisely.
It’s…
Messy.
“They’re not using her system,” I say slowly.
“What do you mean?”
“They’re imitating it,” I reply. “But they don’t understand it.”
I highlight the inconsistencies.
Timing gaps.
Priority errors.
Connections that don’t hold under pressure.
“This isn’t predictive modeling,” I continue. “This is guesswork dressed up as certainty.”
Aaron goes quiet.
“Meaning?” he asks.
I look at the list again.
At the scale of it.
At the people already reacting to it.
“Meaning they’re about to get people killed.”
And not by accident.