Page 37 of What We Become

“What?”

“There’s a text that didn’t forward.”

His attention snaps fully to me. “One of the spoofs?”

I nod. “The catch ran through the secure relay Fenrir severed when he locked me out after the warehouse. When he restored my access, the trackers came back. The cameras came back. The phone mirror looked live.” I enlarge the connection record. “But the catch never reauthenticated. The script was running, so it showed green on my end. It was just listening to a dead feed.”

Holden’s jaw tightens. “And Brock had stopped texting.”

“For six weeks. There was nothing to trigger it, so an empty log looked exactly like a working one.” I stare at the carrier record from yesterday. One message, sitting inside the gap I didn’t know existed. “Stephen found the one dead wire in my entire system.”

“Fenrir cut the wire.”

“And I didn’t test it when he gave me access again. We could have known she was in danger at least an hour sooner.”

“Milo—”

“We can argue about whose fault it is after we find him.” My fingers move across the screen. “Right now, I’m fixing it.”

I rebuild the catch through two independent relays. If either connection drops, every device in the house will scream.

That won’t undo yesterday.

But Stephen won’t get silence from me twice.

“There’s something else,” I say, scanning a second file. “Fenrir also pulled a one-use handset from the tower records. It came online twelve minutes after Sage’s tracker stopped, half a mile from the beach house, and made one call.”

Holden’s eyes sharpen. “To who?”

“That’s the problem. The call bounced through three relays and terminated at a VoIP endpoint that no longer exists. Whoever was on the other end had infrastructure. Corporate security, intelligence, something adjacent.”

“And you think it was Stephen.”

“The timing, the tower, the single use—it looks like a check-in.”

“Looks like,” Holden says. “Don’t turn inference into fact.”

“I know. But Stephen may not be working alone on this. He was part of the Kennel. They could be helping him.”

The possibility settles between us like a third passenger.

“Okay. Let’s log that as a genuine possibility,” Holden says. “But first, we need to know who he is.”

My phone buzzes again before I can make a joke about catfishing. It’s a new file dump. Fenrir moves fast when properly motivated by attempted wall-murder. I skim, thumb flying.

“Okay,” I murmur. “Okay, this is fun in a very upsetting way.”

“Read.”

“Tacoma address history until eighteen. Community college for one semester, dropped out. Two psych holds—brief, both after ‘family incidents,’ whatever that means. One disorderly conduct charge at nineteen, sealed. Then a whole lot of nothing on paper and way too much movement off paper.” I scroll. “Cash-heavy work. Contract gigs. Dog-walking app, house-sitting app, freelance copy editing, data annotation. Lots of jobs that let him disappear into other people’s lives without anyone asking why he’s there.”

Holden’s mouth goes flat. “Of course.”

“Oh, and here’s the really gross part. He’s in all of Brock’s accounts. Has been for—shit—a long time.”

Holden turns his head. Slow. “What?”

I scroll harder, my stomach doing ugly little gymnastics. “There are device overlaps going back almost a year—login assists, password resets, draft folders opened from secondary IPs. Brock’s phone, Stephen’s laptop, same sessions. Seems he was completely embedded.”