Page 119 of Dose

My secure phone vibrates on the floor beside the bath.

I reach for it without moving Isla from between my legs.

The message is from Nikolai.

Abort transmitted. No acknowledgment. Both trackers moving toward the return corridor. Dominic twenty-one minutes out.

Isla reads it over my arm.

“Twenty-one minutes is too long.”

“Yes.”

I do not tell her Ezra is brilliant, as though brilliance makes a person immune to machinery designed for him.

“Dominic is already going after him,” I say. “Marcus has both signals. If either changes, Nikolai wakes us.”

“You think we’re going to sleep?”

“No.”

We stay in the bath until the water cools, Isla held against me, the phone balanced on the dry tile within reach.

Twenty-one minutes becomes nineteen.

Then seventeen.

32

ISLA

Two chairs are empty in the Chamber this morning.

Ezra is missing.

Dominic appears on the secure display from a moving command vehicle, so his chair remains empty too.

He reached the return corridor thirteen minutes after Nikolai’s message last night. Ezra’s coat was in a station locker with one tracker still sewn into the lining. The second traveled six stops on a commuter train before Dominic recovered it beneath an empty seat.

No blood. No body. No verified image of Ezra after the abort was transmitted.

The platform cameras contain a seven-minute loop.

We do not know whether he recognized the Gamma trap and shed the trackers himself or whether someone made the decision for him.

The distinction is everything. We have no way to resolve it yet.

Seven brothers sit around the table. I sit beside Theon because I am part of this council, not because Nikolai granted me temporary permission to belong.

Marcus stands beside the main display with his mask off. His pupils are uneven from a night spent moving between surveillance feeds.

“Dominic continues the Ezra search,” he says. “Local assets are covering transit exits, hospitals and the contact route. No confirmed sighting.”

Nikolai looks toward Dominic’s image. “Anything to add?”

“The camera loop is professional,” Dominic says. Road noise breaks around the words. “Not commercial security work. I have two possible vehicles, neither confirmed. I’ll update when I have something worth saying.”

The screen shifts to a map of the Midwest.