“Copy that.” I rest my hand on her shoulder.
Hutch looks at the screen one last time.
He stares at the financial architecture on Cipher’s secondary monitor: the routing diagram of shell companies and offshore accounts, the system’s branching logic, the way the network routes around damage like a living thing.
Something crosses his face. It arrives and goes under in less than a second, but I’ve known him long enough to know the difference between Hutch processing a problem and Hutch recognizing something he wasn’t expecting.
He doesn’t say anything about it.
“Ex Tenebris Lux.” He traces the edge of the monitor. “From darkness, light. Let’s burn them out.”
19
The Choice
IRIS
The nightmare doesn’t scream.It whispers.
It sounds like shifting glass, or the hiss of a ventilator forcing air into lungs functioning long past breath.
I wake with a gasp, my body jerking upright in the dark.
My heart hammers a frantic rhythm against my ribs,thump-thump, thump-thump, mimicking the rotor beat of the helicopter. I press a hand to my chest, forcing air into my lungs, forcing the panic back down into the black box holding the last twenty-four hours.
The room sits silent.
I look left.
Boyd is there.
Deep, heavy sleep induced by exhaustion and blood loss. He lies on his back, his injured arm propped on a pillow, white dressing stark against bruised skin. Even in sleep, his brow carries a permanent etching of vigilance.
The rise and fall of his chest is the only thing that anchors me, but I need motion.
I slide out of bed.
My bare feet hit cold concrete. The sensation grounds me. I need to focus on something other than the phantom heat of the fire.
I grab the hoodie Boyd gave me earlier, pine and gun oil and dried sweat, and pull it over my T-shirt. I pad silently to the door, easing it open.
The hallway runs dim, lit by low-level red emergency strips. The safe house hums with the quiet machinery of a fortress at rest.
I walk without a destination. My mind runs a chaotic slideshow of images I can’t delete.
The boy’s face on the screen. Andrei.
The gallery of thumbnails. The inventory.
Mercer’s smile.
I end up in the kitchen. Vast, industrial. Stainless steel surfaces gleam in the moonlight filtering through the high windows.
I stop.
I’m not alone.
A man sits at the island in the dark. He isn’t eating or drinking. He just sits there, fixed on a tablet screen, perfectly still.
