Chapter 10
They lay in the dark, not touching. Emerson’s breathing evened out an hour ago—steady, trusting.
He wanted her.
Audrey understood that kind of leverage.
And she’d used it.
She and Emerson did everything but sleep together, and drugs made distracting him easy.
But Audrey wasn’t lying there because she couldn’t sleep.
She was measuring the room, replaying every answer he’d withheld and deciding how much further she was willing to push before sunrise.
If Emerson wanted to involve her in his mysterious plans, then before the night was over, she would know exactly what game she’d been dragged into.
When his arm fell from her waist, she counted sixty seconds before rising.
Emerson wanted her for something, but she wasn’t going to trust him. Audrey needed to find her mother, to learn the truth about herself. That urgent goal burned below her skin. She would seek answers alone.
His jacket lay folded on the chair. She slipped her hand into his pocket and took her phone. Then she saw the tablet—thin, unbranded, edges scuffed. It was made entirely of glass. The clear surface caught the dim light.
Its shape lit up her memory.
The man in her backyard all those years ago had held something like this. Older, perhaps, but it had the same sense that it didn’t belong.
She picked it up. The glass came alive, as though reacting to her hold. A biometric scanner flared on the screen.
Audrey prowled back into the bedroom, and, careful not to disturb him, she lifted Emerson’s hand just enough to press his palm over the glass. The device responded to him immediately, blooming brighter. She left him there, breathing slow and deep, and returned to the couch.
The interface defaulted to one she didn’t know, with hundreds of folders and only a few apps.
There was no social media, no music, and no signs of a regular life.
She changed it to English, also labeled as Aggregate Standard, with a calendar and timestamp she couldn’t decipher.
Margins referenced compliance with Aggregate Protocols, as if it answered to an authority beyond the government.
She opened what looked like a photo folder.
Frame by frame, devastation appeared: buildings gutted by fire, smoke billowing from broken windows, streets reduced to rubble.
It took Audrey a moment to understand what she was seeing. At first, she thought they were news photos, but upon closer examination, she realized they were evidence, taken straight from the scene.
She scrolled again, slower this time. Patterns appeared in how the images were tagged, but the locations were tied to places she couldn’t identify. One line repeated across multiple entries: ASSET TRANSFER, CONTAINMENT VERIFIED.
Asset.
Her fingers paused on the screen. Whatever this was, they weren’t hiding people like her—they were transporting them. And Emerson was investigating.
Scrolling further, she discovered headlines she didn’t recognize. Her eyes snagged on them one by one:
Hundreds Killed in Attack on Aggregate Assembly
Nomac Terror Attack: No Group Claims Responsibility
Uninhabitable Moons Possible Sites for Weapons Testing
Nomac Arson Rampage Classified as Terrorist Attack by HI5; Alleged Organizations Under Investigation
Audrey swallowed hard, Alex’s words ringing in her ears.
You, me, your family…we’re not like the humans here.
This is what he meant. These places, this alien name—the Aggregate—were from somewhere else. Somewhere not on this Earth. Everything she’d believed pressed in on her at once, but she didn’t think the answer to who she was would be found in panic. With shaking hands, she kept searching.
The next folder she opened tightened the muscles in her chest.
There were more photographs. Several appeared to be surveillance stills and long-lens shots taken from across streets and through crowds.
Her mother’s face filled the screen. They showed her at different ages, with her hair longer, then shorter, or pulled back.
Some images had to be old enough to predate Audrey’s birth.
In several, Sophia stood beside a woman Audrey didn’t recognize.
They were so similar in bone structure and expression that they could have been sisters.
She didn’t think her mom had a sister. But how much did she really know her? The realization didn’t land all at once; instead, it spread slowly, like oil through water. Her mother had lied about so much, including her aunt, it seemed.
She navigated deeper until she found a section labeled Aggregate Marked Notices, and inside, her mother’s name appeared instantly. Audrey’s eyes narrowed on it. Her last name wasn’t Sarafian. It was Simas. Was it her mother’s maiden name? Another piece of knowledge Audrey hadn’t known.
The Marked Notice was labeled L10R. The designation sat beside a black circular symbol and a block of red text: CONSIDERED ARMED AND DANGEROUS.
Audrey skimmed the summary. Its scale distorted her sense of proportion: coordinated bombings, weapons-grade destruction, nearly 900 dead in a place called Nomac.
She recognized some acronyms—FBI, Interpol—but not all of them.
Every page repeated the same warning in bold: FAILURE TO HEED AN L10R MARKED NOTICE MAY RESULT IN AGGREGATE SANCTIONS.
Her heart rate quickened at the sight of the unfamiliar word again. Aggregate. The other word—sanctions—she understood. Countries turned against countries over it.
Sophia wasn’t unstable.
She was operational.
And very, very wanted.
She was central to the destruction on a scale Audrey had never imagined.
Alex had told her some of this, but seeing it all stamped, cataloged, and sorted under the highest threat level reshaped everything.
If Sophia had been wanted at this level, then she’d have known exactly what would happen when the police came for Audrey the night their house burned to ash.
A stab of hurt threatened to squeeze the breath from her, raw and bruising. But she forced it down. If she let sorrow take root, it would overwhelm her. She needed answers, not self-pity.
Another file bore the name Mihail. His last name was marked unknown. Its label was Aggregate Marked Notice L11R.
If Mom’s a ten, who was worse?
The charges were similar to Sophia’s, with the networks overlapping and the same symbol stamped at the top. Known associate: Sophia Simas.
There was a third and final file. Audrey tapped it open. Inside was an Aggregate Marked Notice L12R, higher than the others, for a man named Ryker Valalli.
It was strangely familiar.
The information was thin but striking. His notice named him as the leader of the Voírían Separatists, the group Emerson had mentioned. Reports called him impossible to track—he appeared where there were no transport logs and survived impossible strikes. His last sighting?
Nepra.
While most of the details didn’t make sense to her, one piece was clear—this man was the most wanted fugitive in existence.
No clear photograph existed, only a sketch. But Audrey didn’t need clarity—it showed the same eyes from the club and her backyard. Dark and steady. He watched her like she was a problem to solve, as if every move had already been decided and the rest of them were just catching up.
The same cold pressure she’d felt earlier returned with a new intensity.
Here was the man she’d been chasing all these years, and who had been taunting her in return. The man she’d blamed for everything.
And now he had a name. Ryker Valalli.
A desperate need to learn more about him surged through her. Typing frantically, she searched for additional information.
Nothing—no more pictures, no more news articles, and no more profiles.
Audrey was about to move on when her eyes fell on another folder. One that bore her name. Air rushed from her lungs as she double-tapped it.
Dozens of subfolders were inside. They held her court documents, police reports, psychological evaluations, and global news coverage. There were photos, too. One was of her in the high school grounds; another, in the courtroom. He even had her mugshot.
For years, Emerson had cataloged her. She was a case study…a variable, he had said.
Everything about it unsettled her, but she couldn’t let fear get in the way of finding her mother.
She needed something more concrete about the warehouse district if she was going to chase the lead Emerson had given her.
If this were a system, it would have seams. She filtered the transport logs by location until she found the place she’d been looking for—Tolusa.
The entries were far more familiar. All movement was tied to tangible infrastructure that Audrey recognized.
It was all on Earth. She dove into one, and it flew open in a flurry of documents.
From what she could understand, a warehouse in Tolusa had been flagged recently as the site of a known Silo-ID forger.
She didn’t know what that was, but the timestamp had been within the last week.
Its location was stated clearly in the margins: eastern Tolusa, the South Shore neighborhood.
Her breath shortened as more pieces shifted into place.
None of this had ever been random, and it was bigger than the night of the fire. She was one piece inside a larger game she didn’t understand.
Did Alex know all this?
The answer was yes, even if she didn’t want to admit it to herself. She hadn’t hallucinated that he and the killer recognized each other at Sarai.
For a moment, panic crawled into her throat.
Then it calmed. Seeing it in black-and-white made her focus.
While she had a location for Sophia, there were still too many unanswered questions. What did Emerson really want? Was he tracking her for Ryker? Tracking Ryker for himself? Or had he been building his own file on Sophia long before Audrey entered the picture?
Audrey was done being the only one who didn’t understand the game.
Time for some answers.
She put the tablet back where she found it and walked to the hall closet where she’d left her coat. The knife was still in her pocket. She freed it, testing the weight in her hand, not because she intended to use it. All she wanted to see was how Emerson reacted to the possibility.
Back in the bedroom, Emerson lay on his back, face slack in sleep, looking younger than he had any right to. Audrey pressed the cold edge of the blade lightly beneath his jaw and moved close enough that her breath brushed his ear. “Wake up.”
His eyes opened at once. As if he’d been completely awake.
She held his gaze, the knife steady to his skin. “You’ve been watching me for far longer than you let on,” she said.
He didn’t deny it.
“You’re tied to Sophia. To Mihail.” She paused before saying the name that had anchored the entire night. “To Ryker.”
An unreadable look passed through his eyes at that third name.
Out of the corner of Audrey’s eye, the river moved through the city in a roiling current, the water glinting in the stark daylight. It was well into the morning now, and Emerson had said they had only the next twenty-four hours.
Tick-tock.
The blade pressed a fraction closer to Emerson’s throat. “I know about the Silo Identification forger, too.” She didn’t need to read his mind to know he believed her. Audrey’s grip on the knife steadied. “I decide what I’m ready for.”
A beat.
“You want me involved? Then we start there. What’s your plan?”