Chapter Eleven
Harper
Work was the only thing keeping Harper sane, so she threw herself into it with the kind of single-minded ferocity that her Columbia professors had called “impressive” and her therapist had called “avoidant.”
Both were right. She had always used work to outrun her feelings.
The Vanguard investigation had consumed eighteen-hour days because the alternative was sitting with the emptiness of an apartment she’d stopped decorating and a personal life she’d stopped tending.
Now she was doing the same thing at Ironpeak—building the biggest story of her career one meticulously sourced paragraph at a time, because the alternative was sitting with the memory of Drake’s body against hers in the firelight and the shattering intimacy of a man who had let every mask fall and shown her the truth underneath.
The story was taking shape. She had Carmen’s testimony, given over two recorded sessions in the counseling office Carmen had built from nothing.
The crisis negotiator spoke about her recruitment, her arrival, her dawning horror at discovering she’d been deployed as an unwitting intelligence asset.
Carmen was careful with classified details but unflinching about the emotional truth, and her account formed the narrative spine of the article: this is what happens when a government decides its own citizens are the enemy.
Fenris provided the intelligence architecture.
He wouldn’t go on record—“I don’t exist in the ways that matter, and I’d like to keep it that way”, but he fed Harper documents that she could independently verify.
Military movement logs that matched civilian satellite imagery she purchased from a commercial provider.
Financial records traced through three shell companies to Aegis Strategic Solutions.
Communication intercepts that she couldn’t publish directly but that pointed her toward publicly available records confirming the same patterns.
It was painstaking work. Harper loved it.
She loved the architecture of evidence, the way facts interlocked like masonry, each piece supporting the next until the structure could bear the weight of scrutiny.
She loved the moment when a connection clicked, when a donor name on a campaign filing matched a board member of a defense contractor matched a signatory on a budget allocation, and the story sharpened from suspicion into certainty.
She also loved, though she would not have used that word, not yet, not out loud, the way Drake anticipated her needs before she articulated them.
He’d appear with a document she hadn’t asked for because he’d predicted her next question.
He’d arrange an interview she’d been trying to schedule because he understood the evidentiary chain she was building better than some editors she’d worked for.
When she hit a wall at midnight, eyes burning, he’d quietly set a cup of the terrible orc coffee beside her laptop and say nothing, because he knew that silence was what she needed and company was what she wanted and both were the same thing when they came from him.
Drake was beside her through all of it. Officially, his role was liaison, facilitating interviews, approving document access, ensuring Harper didn’t stumble into classified territory.
Unofficially, he was her strategic partner, her sounding board, the person who challenged every assumption and sharpened every argument until the story was a blade.
Officially, his constant presence was for her protection after the ambush. Unofficially, neither of them could stand being apart for more than an hour before the pull, the bond, the compass, whatever this impossible thing was, made concentration impossible.
They developed shorthand. A raised eyebrow from Harper meant the evidence is thin here.
A slight tilt of Drake’s head meant I have something to add but I’m letting you lead.
Her pen tapping meant she was stuck; his silence meant he was giving her space to work through it.
They moved around each other in the cramped anteroom with the instinctive choreography of people whose bodies had mapped each other’s gravity.
Sometimes their hands brushed when reaching for the same document.
Each time, the contact sent a jolt through Harper’s nervous system that was wildly disproportionate to the physical stimulus.
She’d catch Drake’s eyes and see the same shock mirrored there, the same awareness that whatever lived between them was not diminishing with distance or discipline.
It was growing. Quietly, stubbornly, like something rooted deep.
At night, alone in her dwelling, she’d review her notes and find his handwriting in the margins.
Comments he’d added while she was interviewing someone, corrections to her orcish spellings, small observations that demonstrated how carefully he’d been reading her work.
Once, beside a paragraph about the settlement’s cultural programs, he’d written simply: You see us clearly.
Thank you. She’d stared at those five words for twenty minutes and then pressed the page flat to preserve them.
It was a different kind of intimacy, intellectual, precise, the communion of two minds building something together, and it rivaled even the physical.
* * *
She interviewed Varek on the eighth day.
Drake had advised against it. “He’ll use the interview to make his case. You’ll be giving him a platform.”
“That’s exactly what I want to do,” Harper had replied. “If I only tell one side, the story is propaganda. I need his perspective.”
Varek met her in the training ground, his territory, deliberately chosen. He sat on a stone bench with his back straight and his scarified arms resting on his knees, and he looked at Harper with the frank assessment of a man who evaluated everyone on their capacity for honesty.
“You wish to understand why I oppose the prince,” he said. No preamble. No pleasantries. Harper appreciated it.
“I wish to understand your position. There’s a difference.”
Something shifted in his expression. Not warmth, exactly, but a reduction in hostility. He’d expected a sympathetic profile of Drake. He was getting something harder and more valuable: genuine inquiry.
“I do not oppose Drake,” Varek said, and the distinction seemed to matter to him.
“I oppose the assumption that his way is the only way. Diplomacy. Education. Performing for humans so they will grant us the right to exist.” He leaned forward, and his deep voice carried the cadence of something rehearsed not because it was insincere but because he’d thought about it for years.
“My parents died in the wars. Before the hiding, before the treaty. They died because they trusted that humans would see them as people. They were wrong.”
Harper’s pen moved across the Moleskine. She didn’t interrupt.
“Drak saved us. His leadership, his strength, his willingness to fight when fighting was necessary and to hide when hiding was necessary. He earned the right to trust humans by first proving he could survive without their approval.” Varek’s eyes held hers.
“Drake has never had to prove that. He has never been without human approval. Georgetown, the media, the diplomatic circuits, they applaud him because he makes them comfortable. I ask: what happens when comfort is no longer an option? When diplomacy fails and the only language left is the one spoken with blood?”
“You think he’ll hesitate.”
“I think he has never been tested. And a leader who has never been tested is a leader the clan cannot trust with its life.”
It was, Harper had to admit, a coherent position.
Not hateful. Not irrational. The fear of a man who had lost everything once and was determined to never lose it again.
She understood that fear. She carried her own version of it, the retraction, the institutional betrayal, the knowledge that trust could be weaponized.
“For what it’s worth,” she said, closing the notebook, “I think you’re wrong about Drake. But I think you’re asking the right questions. And I’ll make sure your perspective is represented accurately.”
Varek studied her for a long moment. “You are not what I expected,” he said. “From a journalist.”
“I get that a lot.”
She stood to leave, then paused. “Can I ask you something personal? Off the record.”
Varek considered this. “You may ask. I will decide whether to answer.”
“When you look at the next generation, Koroth, Drake, Theron, Fenris, Senna, what do you see? Honestly.”
Something shifted in his expression. The political leader retreated and the man emerged, just for a moment.
“I see my people surviving,” he said quietly.
“In ways I did not expect. In ways that frighten me. The old language fades a little more each generation. The ceremonies shorten. The children speak more English than orcish. I look at them and I see a future, but I grieve for the past that future replaced.”
“That’s not opposition to Drake,” Harper said. “That’s mourning.”
Varek’s jaw tightened. He said nothing for a long time. Then: “Perhaps.”
Harper walked back to the anteroom with the interview recording warm in her pocket and a more complicated understanding of the succession crisis than she’d had before.
The story wasn’t simply progressives versus traditionalists, future versus past. It was a community negotiating the terms of its own evolution, with every faction acting from love for the same thing: survival.
The disagreement was about method, not motive.
That nuance would make the article better. It would also make it harder to write, because nuance resisted headlines and defied the binary framework that made stories shareable. But Harper had not rebuilt her career on easy stories. She’d rebuilt it on true ones.
* * *
The breakthrough came at two in the morning.
Harper was cross-referencing Fenris’s financial data with the FEC filings she’d pulled from public databases when the pattern crystallized.
Senator Harmon’s campaign had received donations from twelve individuals who also served on the board of a holding company called Cascade Futures LLC.
Cascade Futures LLC held a controlling interest in three subsidiaries, one of which, buried under two layers of corporate restructuring, was Aegis Strategic Solutions.
The same Aegis whose contractors had ambushed them in the forest.
Harper sat back in her chair and stared at the screen. The money trail was a closed loop: Harmon’s donors funded the company that employed the people trying to destroy the settlement that Harmon’s legislation was designed to dismantle. It was elegant in its corruption. And it was provable.
But the final piece, the server records that would show direct communication between Harmon’s office and Aegis, was locked behind government-grade encryption on a server in D.C.
Without those communications, the financial trail was circumstantial.
A good lawyer could argue coincidence. Harper’s article needed to be airtight.
She told Drake the next morning. They were in the anteroom, dawn light making the dust motes glow, and he stood very still as she laid out what she had and what she needed.
“I know someone,” he said. “A Georgetown contact. Works in tech oversight on the Hill. He could access those server records.”
“But?”
“But it would mean going back to D.C. Leaving Ironpeak.” His jaw worked. He didn’t say the rest. He didn’t say leaving you. But the words hung in the space between them, visible as breath in cold air.
Harper’s chest tightened. Two weeks ago, she would have pushed for the trip without hesitation. The story came first. The story always came first.
Two weeks ago, she hadn’t known what it felt like to have someone look at her the way Drake looked at her, like she was the answer to a question he’d been asking his entire life.
“There might be another way,” she said slowly. “Let me work on it.”
Drake’s relief was so brief she almost missed it. Almost.