Chapter 69 Aaron
Aaron
Location: Moving
Time: Same
“Tell me,” I say.
No room for comfort. No room for hesitation.
If there’s a nightmare coming, I want it named.
Lark doesn’t look away this time.
“They’re going to force a scenario,” she says. “Layered. Timed. Designed to collapse on itself.”
“How?”
“They’ll build a cascade,” she replies. “Multiple failure points across different systems—energy, transport, communications. Each one feeding the next. I’ve seen this in the archives, and there was nothing I could do.”
I process it fast.
Too fast.
Because I already know where this is going.
“What kind of catastrophic?” I ask.
Her eyes meet mine.
Steady.
Unflinching.
“The kind you don’t get to recover from.”
Silence hits hard.
The vehicle hums beneath us, but inside—it’s dead quiet.
I feel the shift.
This isn’t prevention anymore.
This is triage.
Then Ronan speaks, voice low, precise.
“He’s not chasing chaos,” he says. “He’s engineering meaning.”
Lark nods once.
“Yes.”
Ronan’s eyes flick to me.
“He’s going to trade lives for narrative.”
That lands.
Hard.
Because I’ve seen men like that.
Not killers.
Architects.
Men who don’t just want destruction—
They want the world to understand it.
I look back at Lark.
“He wants you to choose,” I say.
“Yes.”
“And he thinks you will.”
Her voice is quiet.
“He knows I will.”
That’s the problem.
That’s the entire problem.
Because she’s right.
She will choose.
And whatever choice she makes…
It’s going to cost her something she can’t get back.
I lean forward, decision already made.
“Then we don’t let him control the board.”
Ronan’s mouth tilts slightly. Not quite a smile.
“Good,” he says. “Because he thinks he already does.”