I let her slide down slowly.
“You’re alive.” She kisses my chest, tracing the scar over my heart.
“Yeah.” I lean back against the wet tile, closing my eyes. “We both are.”
Thirty minutes later, we’re in the war room.
I’m dressed in clean sweats and a T-shirt, my arm in a fresh sling. Iris wears one of my hoodies. It swallows her frame, the sleeves hanging past her hands. She looks small, but she walks with a new steel in her spine.
The war room is the heart of the facility. A circular room dominated by a bank of monitors and a central holographic table smelling of ozone and black coffee.
The team’s assembled.
Hutch stands at the head of the table, arms crossed, staring at the screens.
Wraith leans against the back wall, sharpening a knife. He nods at me as we enter.
Rook sits on the edge of a desk, a paper file open across his massive thighs. That storm-grey gaze comes up, sweeping Iris in a single pass, reading the change in her posture, the way she stands closer to me. He knows.
And then there’s Cipher.
Julian “Cipher” Rhodes. The youngest member of the team. The chaos agent. He sits in a swivel chair, surrounded by three monitors, fingers flying over a backlit keyboard. He wears a T-shirt that says I am the warranty voider.
“About time.” Cipher spins around. “I was about to send a search party or a maid service.”
“Watch it, junior.” I pull out a chair for Iris.
She sits. I stand behind her, my good hand resting on the back of her chair as a claim and a warning.
“Status.” Hutch unfolds his arms.
“The laptop’s a goldmine.” Cipher’s face lights up with the manic energy of a hacker cracking the motherlode. “Mercer’s security was good. Military grade. But he made one mistake.”
“He left it unlocked.” Iris steps forward.
“No.” Cipher points at the screen. “He used a cloud backup. The laptop was just a terminal. The data isn’t on the drive; it’s on a server in the Caymans. But, because Dr. Kincaid here interrupted the sync by yanking the cable, it created a cache file. A ghost image of the last active directory.”
“English, Cipher.” Bronco grunts from the corner, nursing a mug of coffee.
“I have files.” Cipher hits a key.
The main screen on the wall flickers to life, displaying a directory tree so massive it makes my sight blur.
“It’s huge.” Cipher clicks through folders labeled with alphanumeric strings. “Tens of thousands of unlabeled image files, manifests, and encrypted ledgers. It would take a forensic team six months to manually sort this.”
“We don’t have six months.” Hutch frowns. “What are we looking at?”
“I don’t know.” Cipher’s fingers fly over the keyboard. “It looks like a catalog, but without the index key, I’m just guessing.”
The room goes quiet. The momentum stalls.
“Julian.” Iris grips the edge of the table. “Can you run an AI image recognition script against the entire cache?”
“Yeah.” Cipher spins his chair to look at her. “I have a proprietary crawler that can scrape the images for specific parameters. Facial recognition, objects, text. What are we looking for?”
“A tattoo.” Iris taps the screen. “On the inner forearm. A specific, geometric barcode. Sharp lines, industrial. Not decorative.”
“You saw this on the victim?” I look at her.
