Page 33 of Wraith: Lethal Impact

The hacker stops typing. She looks directly into the camera lens.

< You know the protocol. If the agency is compromised, you extract yourself. You go to ground. You do not initiate a rescue op for a civilian that isn't the package.

< She's Lily's friend. Dax types fast. < And we're not leaving the country without her.

The hacker's eyes shift on the screen, moving past Dax to lock onto me standing behind him. She studies my face for a long second. A flicker of understanding crosses her features—a woman who knows what it means to be dragged into a war she didn't start.

< You're the ballerina.

I nod, though she can't hear me.

She looks back down at her keyboard.

< Julian is going to kill me for aiding an agent operating off the grid.

< Cipher doesn't have to know. Dax pauses, his fingers hovering over the keys. < Find her.

On the screen, she cracks her knuckles.

< Give me the metadata. Time of extraction and location.

< Grand Solarium. Twenty-two hundred hours yesterday. They used a service elevator to the loading dock.

< Pulling the local transport manifests. The Consortium owns the local police. They scrubbed the traffic cameras. But they didn't scrub the toll transponders.

She types in bursts. On our end, the only sound is the relentless whine of the servers and my breathing.

< Got it. An armored transport van cleared the industrial sector toll booth at twenty-two forty. It didn't bounce through the city grid. It went straight off the primary arterials.

< Where?

< I'm isolating the GPS ping from the vehicle's navigation system. They tried to spoof the signal, but they're using an outdated routing protocol. Amateurs.

A map of Thailand appears next to the chat box. A red dot pulses thirty miles north of Bangkok, deep in mountainous jungle.

< It's a private estate. Owned by a shell corporation tied to a logistics firm in Macau. That's Consortium money. It's a fortified compound. Concrete walls. Biometric gates. You can't walk in there. You don't have a team. You don't have overwatch.

< I don't need a team. I need gear. Dax downloads the coordinates to a secured drive on his wrist console.

The hacker sighs on the video feed. A new string of numbers appears in the chat box.

< I anticipated you'd do something stupid. That's a dead-drop cache secured by an old Task Force 9 contact. It's in the market district above you. Lockbox four. The code is zero-seven-two.

< Thank you. Wipe the trace for me.

< Stay alive, Dax. Both of you.

The connection terminates. The screen goes black.

The silence in the relay den is heavy. We have a location. The abstract terror of running from an invisible enemy has solidified into a concrete target.

My soaked clothes cling to my skin. Exhaustion tugs at my bones, but beneath it is a new, sharper sensation. Clarity.

I was a dancer twenty-four hours ago. My life was defined by the strict geometry of the stage, the precise angles of my arms, the applause of the audience.

Today, I'm an accomplice to a fugitive. I bribed a criminal in an illegal server farm. I'm going to walk into a jungle to hunt the men who took my friend.

"We gear up." Dax turns from the desk, his silhouette cutting through the neon shadows. "Then we head into the jungle."