Chapter 25 Jordan #2
My left escort jerks, and a bloom of dark spreads on his shoulder.
Blood.
My brain goes cold and clear.
“Oh my GOD—”
“Down!” the other escort barks.
People scream. The market erupts. Vendors duck. Stalls collapse. The air fills with panic and the sour stink of fear sweat.
A second pop.
The vendor behind the tarp collapses backward, eyes wide, knocked flat by the shockwave of bodies trying to flee.
I drop instinctively, hands slamming onto gritty ground that smells like old rain and grease. My compad thumps against my ribs.
A hand lunges toward my jacket pocket.
Not to stab me.
To grab.
My eyes snap up and I see them—two figures in the chaos, moving with discipline that does not belong in a market stampede. One reaches for me while the other covers with a compact energy weapon angled low so nobody notices until it’s too late.
They’re not here to kill me.
They’re here to steal my compad.
My throat tightens.
They want the authorization key fragment.
The dead-drop arming token. The vault control.
I slam my elbow upward into the reaching arm. Hard.
The figure grunts, stumbles, recovers too fast—trained.
My escort lunges, tackling one attacker into a stall. Metal and fabric explode outward. Someone screams.
The second attacker pivots toward me again, hand outstretched.
I don’t think.
I react.
My fingers dive into my pocket, grab a small device I brought purely because paranoia is a lifestyle: a grid access spike.
It’s not supposed to work here. Gur’s infrastructure is messy, layered, patched together like a junk ship. But chaos makes systems sloppy.
I slam the spike into a nearby utility panel beneath the stall frame.
The panel sparks.
The air smells instantly of ozone and burning insulation.
“Come on,” I hiss, typing a quick override on my compad with shaking fingers. “Come ON—”
The attacker lunges—
And the market’s lights die.
Every neon canopy, every vendor lamp, every holographic ad panel—gone. Darkness slams down like a fist.
People scream louder, blind panic now.
But I’m not blind.
Not fully.
My compad’s low-light mode kicks in, painting the world in pale green outlines. I see shapes moving. I see the attacker hesitate for half a second.
Half a second is a lifetime.
I roll under a toppled stall frame, scrape my shoulder hard enough to sting, and crawl toward a service grate I spotted earlier—maintenance access for drainage tunnels.
The air down there smells damp and metallic, like old water and rust.
I rip the grate open with raw adrenaline strength and drop into the tunnel.
The darkness swallows me.
Above, I hear boots pounding, bodies crashing, voices shouting.
One voice—close—curses in a language that sounds Vakutan.
I scramble deeper into the service tunnel, knees slamming into wet stone. My breath comes fast, loud in the confined space. The air is cold enough to make my teeth ache.
I don’t stop until I’m far enough that the market noise becomes muffled thunder.
Then I press my forehead against the tunnel wall and force myself not to vomit.
My hands shake so badly I can barely hold my compad.
“They weren’t trying to kill me,” I whisper, voice breaking. “They were trying to take it.”
My compad.
My key.
My leverage.
My life.
I breathe in damp rust air and taste blood where I bit my lip.
Then I move.
Because if I stay still, panic wins.
And I don’t have room for panic.
Not now.
When I make it back to the Defrocked Nun, it’s through a service entrance that smells like bleach and old pipes. My escorts are gone—one injured, one dead or missing, I don’t know yet. My chest hurts with the weight of that unknown, but anger keeps me upright like a spine made of knives.
Kaijen guards snap to attention when they see me, startled.
“Where the hell—” one starts.
I shove past him. “Get Lonari.”
They don’t argue. They can smell the violence on me like smoke.
I storm into the back corridors, shaking, furious, wet with tunnel grime. My skin feels too tight. My heart won’t slow down.
Lonari appears at the end of the hall like he stepped out of a shadow.
His eyes lock onto me, and something in his expression changes immediately—concern sharpened into lethal focus.
“What happened?” he asks.
I don’t ease into it. I don’t soften.
“They hit me,” I say, voice raw. “In the market. In public. They shot your escort and tried to steal my compad.”
Lonari’s jaw tightens so hard I hear his teeth grind.
“Did they get it?” he asks, voice low.
I yank the compad from my jacket and hold it up like proof of life. “No.”
His shoulders drop a fraction—relief, barely visible. Then the anger floods back in, hotter.
“They want the key fragment,” I say, because now it’s obvious. “They don’t just want me dead. They want control of my vault. They want to retrieve whatever I have that lets me move Morazin.”
Lonari steps closer, and I can smell him—smoke, steel, something steadier than my shaking.
He studies me like he’s checking for hidden wounds. “Are you hurt?”
“Just my pride,” I snap, then my voice wobbles despite me. “And maybe my ability to pretend this isn’t getting worse.”
Lonari’s eyes soften slightly, and for half a second he looks like he wants to touch my face.
He doesn’t.
Instead, he does something I don’t expect.
He reaches into his coat and pulls out a thin black access token—Kaijen encryption grade, the kind I’ve only seen guards carry. He presses it into my palm.
“Full access,” he says.
I blink. “What?”
“My intel archives,” he says, voice steady. “All of it. Transactions. old ledgers. Nine interactions. Ghostline intercepts. If they’re coming for you, you need to see everything I see.”
My throat tightens.
“That’s… insane,” I whisper.
Lonari’s mouth curves slightly. “Welcome to my life.”
I stare at the token in my hand. It’s warm from his body heat.
He’s trusting me with the syndicate’s secrets.
Not because it’s romantic.
Because it’s strategic.
Because he’s choosing the truth over control.
I swallow hard. “Okay.”
He nods once. “Use it.”
I move past him into the archive room—cold, quiet, lined with sealed servers and encrypted storage stacks. The air smells like coolant and dust. It feels like a vault, like a place where history goes to hide.
I slot the token into the access port.
The archive blooms open in my compad display, thousands of files cascading in organized violence.
I start searching—Nine. tribute. relay access. authorization chains.
My fingers move fast, desperate.
And then I find something that makes my blood go colder than the service tunnels.
A partial alias buried in an old transaction ledger.
Not a name.
A title.
HIGH LANTERN
It appears in authorization lines. In clearance tags. In a pattern that repeats whenever something crosses governments—Alliance, IHC, Coalition. Intergovernmental operations.
My breath catches.
“Lonari,” I whisper.
He steps closer behind me, eyes narrowing as he reads over my shoulder.
“What is that?” he asks.
I swallow, throat dry.
“Someone above Morazin,” I say. “Someone who authorizes the kind of access Morazin shouldn’t have. Someone who can thread needles through multiple governments.”
I point to the title again.
“High Lantern,” I whisper. “That’s… that’s a command-level shadow.”
Lonari’s voice goes quiet. “A handler.”
I nod slowly, heart hammering.
“Yeah,” I say. “And I think we just found the lantern that lit this whole damn fire.”