"Ghost."
"Besides Ghost."
"Servers. Equipment. His pet project, which I don't ask about because the answer would probably give me a headache."
"And the room on the first floor? The one with the locks?"
"Armory."
"I noticed."
Zain looked at him. Seth looked back. Green eyes, sharp as glass. The bruising on his jaw was fading from yellow-green to the pale nothing of healed skin, and the gauntness in his face was softening as regular meals did their work. He looked less like a ghost and more like a person every day.
A person who was going to be a serious problem.
"You're not getting a weapon," Zain said.
"I didn't ask for one."
"You were about to."
"I was thinking about it. There's a difference."
Zain almost admired the precision of the lie
Marcus called a meeting on the fourth day.
The meeting room was exactly what it looked like, a converted dining room with a long table, six chairs, and the walls covered in maps, printouts, and the red-string conspiracy boards that Ghost put together and everyone else pretended to understand. Ghost himself was there, hunched in his corner chair with a laptop balanced on his knees, his dark hair falling over his eyes like a curtain he had no intention of opening.
Nate sat with his feet up, eating an apple with a pocketknife. Jack stood because Jack always stood, back against the wall,arms crossed, the casual posture of a man who could go from still to violent in under a second. Elijah had claimed the chair nearest the window, where the light was best and the sight lines were clear. Old habits.
And Seth, who hadn't been invited, was standing in the doorway.
"This is a private meeting," Marcus said. Not unkindly.
"About the trafficking operation," Seth said. "The one I was in."
"Among other things."
"Then it's about me."
"It's about the operation."
"Which I was inside for four months." Seth's voice was level, but Zain could hear the edge underneath, the controlled anger of a man who'd been treated as a commodity and was not going to be treated as furniture. "I know things. Names. Schedules. Where they keep the shipments, how they rotate the workers. I know the guard who liked to hit people with a pipe and I know the name of the woman who ran the books."
The room went quiet.
Ghost's fingers paused on his keyboard. Nate stopped chewing. Jack's eyes moved from Seth to Zain and back again with the lazy alertness of a predator tracking movement.
Marcus looked at Zain. The look said:This is your problem.
Zain looked at Seth. "Sit down."
"Is that an order?"
"It's an invitation. The only one you're getting."
Seth held his gaze for two seconds, long enough to make it a choice, not compliance, and sat
