Chapter 3
Proximity
THORNE
"Two hours." Ghost looks around the tent. "Convoy. Brass will guard Stratton."
"I've got that." I look at the table. "There's no way I'm letting Stratton out of my sight."
"You sure about that?"
"Absolutely."
"Okay. Bring her in." Ghost pinches the bridge of his nose. We're all operating on fumes.
I do an about-face and march to where I left her. She's still there—same chair, same posture, that same impossible stillness. She hears me come in and doesn't flinch. Doesn't turn. Just waits, like she has all the time in the world and none of it belongs to her.
I grab her arm and haul her to her feet.
She comes up fast—faster than I account for, lighter than she looks—and she stumbles on the camp chair and pitches forward.
For one second, she's against me. Her shoulder hits my chest. Her bound hands catch on my forearm.
Her weight, all of it, leans into me for the half-second before her feet find the ground.
In that half-second, something happens in my body that has nothing to do with my brain.
My hand moves to her hip to steady her.
It's a reflex. My hand is there before I've decided anything. She's upright. I have her hip. Her shoulder is three inches from my face. She smells like the holding cell, like exhaustion, like something underneath both of those things that I'm not going to catalog.
I let go.
Step back.
Get my hand on her arm—the grip, the professional grip, the grip that is purely about moving an asset from point A to point B—and march her toward the command tent.
She doesn't say anything about it.
I don't say anything about it.
She walks where I put her. Out of the perimeter tent, across forty feet of hardpack, into the command tent. The team is already there. She looks at Ghost, not at me.
"Tell me why we shouldn't work the lists without you." Ghost's gray eyes are flat, devoid of warmth.
She doesn't flinch from it.
"You can't." Not defiance. Just the math.
"The architecture is in my head. The filing codes Stratton Financial used: trial cohort designations, institutional access protocols, and the encryption keys for the regional coordinator networks have all been erased.
Halo can brute-force it. It will take weeks, if not months, for him to crack the system.
" Her eyes go to Halo. Not to me. "The patient architecture is more than the lists.
The distribution infrastructure, the institutional access protocols, the financial layering Stratton Financial used to move the money—all of it is designed to be invisible.
I designed it that way." A pause. "If you're going to find every patient, every institution, every coordinator who touched this, you need me to walk you through it. There's no other way in."
Her gaze moves to Ghost, then Halo.
Not to me.
"If the Ghostwater servers go down, the fragments scatter. Phoenix reconstitutes somewhere you'll never find. The cage has to stay intact—you have to let it pull the fragments home." She pauses. "I know what that sounds like. I know you'll need to sit with it."
Nobody speaks.
Her hands are flat on the table.
Still.
I hate those hands.
The hands that wrote the ASHFALL protocol. The hands that designed the financial architecture Phoenix runs on. The same hands that moved money from column A to column B without ever stopping to ask what was being pushed into the veins of children trying not to die of cancer.
My eyes stay on her hands longer than they should.
Long fingers. Precise. Controlled.
Hands built for systems. For structure.
For restraint.
Something tight and violent coils in my chest.
Total. Pressurized. No exit.
My jaw shifts as I grind my teeth, deliberately loosening the tension before I crack.
Because those hands …
Those hands belong to the woman who helped build the machine that poisoned my daughter.
And those same hands are currently the only map we have to dismantle it.
The two facts sit in my head like opposing charges.
They don't cancel each other out.
They don't merge.
They just exist.
Parallel tracks.
I've been waiting since the helicopter for one of them to collapse.
For the rage to win.
Or the mission.
Neither one gives.
Across the table, Stratton adjusts her hands slightly.
A small movement.
Barely anything.
But the shift draws my attention back to the narrow bones of her wrist. The faint pulse there. The way her fingers flex once before settling again against the table.
My body registers it before my mind does.
A flicker of heat. Low. Unwelcome.
The same reaction that's been stalking me since the control tower.
My brain tells me my hands belong around her throat.
My body imagines something else entirely.
Taking control of every precise movement she thinks she owns.
The thought slams into the wall of my anger so hard it makes my vision sharpen.
I drag my attention back up to her face before the idea has time to root.
She still hasn't looked at me. I lock down my emotions. If she looks at me, she'll see what's happening inside my head, and I refuse to let her have that kind of leverage.
"The CHOP pediatric cohort." Halo, eyes on his screen. "How many?"
Her hands don't move. She doesn't hesitate.
"I don't know."
Her answer lands hard because one of those children loves blanket forts and holds her stegosaurus so the T-rex doesn't eat it in the night.
I don't look at Stratton. I can't, not with boiling hot rage rushing through me and the need to execute the woman standing before me.
"We move in ninety minutes." Ghost rises, his posture thick with urgency.
I step out of the command tent. Need air.
I walk past the perimeter netting to the supply trucks, far enough into the open desert that my voice won't carry back to the tents.
I dial Seattle.
My mother answers on the second ring.
"Colt." Not groggy. She stopped sleeping easily when Lily got sick.
"Mom." The word lands in my throat wrong. I clear it. "Where's Lily?"
"Asleep." A pause—the sound of her moving through the house, slippers on the hardwood, the specific creak of the third stair from the landing. "She built a fort in the living room. Blanket and three dining chairs. She's been sleeping in it for two nights."
"Is Theodore with her?"
"Yes." The smile is right there in her voice. "She told me that if she didn't, the T-rex might get him in the night."
Something shifts behind my ribs. Pressure with edges. I put the phone against my shoulder. Press my free hand flat against the cold side of the supply truck. Hold it there until the edges recede enough to function.
"Is she …" My jaw works. "How is she?"
"She had a good day." Another pause. The kettle clicks on. "She asked when you were coming home."
It's hard to believe Lily finished her final infusion. Lily rang the bell when she finished. All the kids do. It's the moment everybody's been waiting for. I was supposed to be there, but Ghost called four hours before, and I headed to West Virginia for an extraction assist.
Hours later, my parents flew her home to Seattle.
"Colt. What's wrong?" Anxiety cracks through my mother's voice.
My forehead finds the cold metal of the truck. The loop runs without me for a moment—Lily, CHOP, ML-273—and I let it. My breath against the steel. The phone presses against my ear. My mother's breath hitches on the other end.
"Pack a bag. Essentials, her medications. I'll send directions."
"Her dinosaurs?"
"Yes."
She knows what that means.
I hang up. Stay at the truck a moment longer, forehead against steel. Then I push off and head back to the command tent to retrieve Stratton.
I choose the vehicle.
Ghost doesn't assign it—he nods to the map, says convoy configuration, standard protective formation. I walk to the second vehicle and get in. Whisper raises an eyebrow at me from across the parking area. I don't acknowledge it.
She comes out under Fuse's escort—hands free. Ghost's call.
I challenge it.
"Hands." The single word drops between us as she reaches the vehicle.
She stops outside the door. Doesn't argue.
Just lifts her wrists. I run a fresh zip tie around them, pulling the plastic tight.
She watches me do it with that same infuriating, mathematical calm.
Her eyes go to the interior, take one sweep—entry, exit, seating arrangement, my position—then she gets in.
Fuse closes the door. Takes position in the lead vehicle.
The door seals. The air in the vehicle changes—the specific compression of an enclosed space with someone in it that you haven't decided what to do with.
She sits across from me.
The armored seat configuration puts her back to the vehicle's direction of travel, facing me. She's looking at the space between us, then out the small, reinforced side window at the Nevada desert turning gray-gold in the early light.
She doesn't speak.
Neither do I.
The engine starts. The convoy moves.
Desert. The kind of flat that makes you understand why people who live in it don't miss other landscapes—nothing to interrupt the line of the horizon, nothing to obscure a threat coming from a distance.
I've worked this terrain. I know it the way I know every terrain I've worked in.
I know what it reveals and what it hides.
I know it by the specific silence of a place with no vertical structure to trap sound.
The silence in this vehicle is not that.
The silence in this vehicle has weight. Presence. The way a third person in a room has weight—the awareness of them, the adjustment of the room around them.
I track the road through the windshield over her shoulder.
The lead vehicle's brake lights. And then—against every reasonable categorization—her hands in her lap.
The fold is precise. Deliberate. A posture of containment, the way a person holds themselves when they are working very hard not to occupy more space than they have been allocated.