Page 113 of The ARC Unit: Breach

“We don’t know yet.”

Raven adjusted the strap on his field bag. “Where do you want us?”

“Admin room first. German team is handling evidence until you photograph the systems. Mercer, if medical asks for language help, you go with them. Otherwise stay with Raven.”

I nodded while Wolf’s eyes rested briefly on the plate carrier Bear had fitted around my shoulder.

“Shoulder holding?” He asked once Raven was out of earshot.

“Yes.”

“Tell Bear if it changes.”

He left before I could decide whether the exchange felt normal. Once I crossed the rear door, the language from the rehabilitation website became impossible to reconcile with what was actually inside.

The front rooms still had the staged furniture from the website, pale chairs and framed landscape prints arranged around a sitting area that probably looked convincing during inspections. The hallway beyond it smelled of disinfectant and damp fabric. Two doors upstairs had deadbolts mounted on the corridor side. Another had a small camera screwed into the wall above it and no handle on the inside. German medics moved between rooms while officers photographed each lock before opening anything they had not already cleared.

I followed Raven into what had been advertised as the administrative office.

The first cabinet held actual passports, dozens of them inside clear plastic sleeves divided by country, with photographs clipped to the front and small handwritten codes replacing the names printed inside. Some were genuine documents taken from the women upstairs. Others had new pages or altered photographs. A second drawer held blank identity cards and partially completed residency documents waiting for photographs.

Raven stopped beside me.

“Don’t touch anything yet.”

“I wasn’t planning to.”

He photographed the cabinet before moving closer.

The desk held a laminator, two printers and a stack of small photographs cut to passport size. None of the women in the photographs were identified by name, just a code written on the back in black marker. A17, C04, B22 and D09 appeared across the first set, numbers that made filing easier by removing the part where anyone had to say a woman’s name.

The wall beside the desk carried a printed movement schedule. Cities appeared in one column, dates in another, followed by vehicle identifiers and the same coded designations from the photographs. The word ready appeared beside some names. Others were marked hold or replace documentation. Two lines on the movement schedule were crossed out across multiple rows.

Raven leaned closer. “Moved yesterday.”

I found the timestamp and counted the codes twice before I trusted the number. Seventeen women had been transferred off the property before dawn, leaving eleven women alive inside the buildings. In total, twenty-eight women had passed through the same system we had been trying to reconstruct from missing-person reports. The same number we had assembled from the missing-person overlap at the compound.

A medic appeared at the office door. “Mercer?”

I turned.

“One of the women understands some English, but she’s not responding to the men. Can you come?”

I followed him upstairs.

The room at the end of the hall had once been a bedroom. Three narrow mattresses sat along one wall beneath windows that had been screwed shut. A fourth mattress lay on the floor. There were no phones, suitcases, purses or personal items anywhere in sight.

Two women were already with medics. A younger woman sat in the corner between the bed frame and wall with her knees pulled against her chest, watching every uniform in the room as though calculating the distance to the door.

Jackal was crouched several feet from her.

He had removed his helmet and one glove. The bare hand rested open on his knee while the gloved one stayed visible beside it, palm turned upward. His weapon had been slung behind his back so the barrel pointed away from her.

“I’m staying here,” he said quietly. “I’m not coming closer.”

The woman did not answer. Jackal looked toward me without standing.

“She understands some English. Doesn’t want anyone touching her.”