Page 264 of What We Burn

“Loki says Fenrir was trying to recover the authenticated Kennel sessions from the devices Knox and Milo collected. One of them triggered a buried failsafe.”

“What kind of failsafe?”

“Every recovered device wiped its encryption keys and bricked itself. The remaining profiles connected to the local yard deleted at the same time. It cascaded through every access route the devices might have given us.”

“So everything’s gone?”

“Not everything. Fenrir still has the material he got before the wipe. Messages, handles, payment fragments. Enough to prove what the Kennel is and what these men were doing. But it’s static. He can’t see new activity and he can’t get back inside.”

“What about the men?”

“We can identify some of them from wallets, vehicle registrations, and what Fenrir had already matched. Not all fifteen. And without the authenticated sessions, we can’t connect every man to a specific Kennel account.”

“Can’t we use fingerprints? Dental records?”

“Dean finished the last of the bodies almost a week ago.”

The answer lands cold.

“So we still don’t know whether Stephen was one of them.”

“No.”

“And SMAN69 could still be out there.”

“Yes.”

“What do we do?”

“Watch. Wait. See whether anyone resurfaces.”

A minute ago, the apartment felt finished with. Now I’m standing outside it with everything I own packed into boxes and the man hunting me has no face, no account, and no trail.

Stephen is a ghost again.

“Fuck!” I yell at the sky.

SIXTY-SIX

MICAH

The kettle clicks off and I call out from the kitchen. “I’m making tea. Anyone want anything?”

“Coffee if there’s any left in the pot,” Eli says from the living room.

“I’d kill for a coffee,” Milo says, then catches himself. “Wait. I can’t have stimulants right now. So . . . sad person tea?”

“Chamomile?”

“Yeah. Chamomile. The drink of the defeated.”

I pour coffee and make tea, carrying all three through to the living room on the tray Holden bought specifically because he got tired of making multiple trips.

“Thanks,” Eli says without looking up. He’s on one end of the couch, kindergarten worksheets spread beside him, red pen moving in precise, encouraging loops. Great job, Lily! with a star. Almost there, Jake! The fact that this man spends his days praising five-year-olds for their penmanship and his nights doing what he does—when we aren’t benched—is a contradiction I stopped trying to reconcile a long time ago. I set the coffee on the side table and let my hand brush his shoulder as I pass. He doesn’t react. He never reacts to the small touches. Just absorbs them, accepts them, keeps grading.

“Cheers,” Milo says, taking his mug from the tray. He’s on the floor between the couch and the coffee table, laptop open to three competing designs for a platform wide enough to hold both mattresses for the fuck pit. He put the final stitch into his ‘Full tummies before we talk murder’ cross-stitch and has already hung it in the kitchen. Eli is horrified. But I think it’s kind of cute. He stitched a little black-and-white kitten holding a knife in its mouth too.

But even though he’s moving from task to task to keep himself busy without any Hangmen work to do, he’s been quiet today—not the scary quiet from last week, but the productive hum of a brain chewing on something. He blows on his tea and wrinkles his nose. “This tastes like a field. Like someone mowed it, put all the clippings into little bags, and then convinced us all it’d make a good drink.”