Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 64044 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 320(@200wpm)___ 256(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64044 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 320(@200wpm)___ 256(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
And there I am.
Months of me. Every probe I ever ran from the desk in my apartment with the window that doesn't close all the way. Every session, timestamped. The clumsy early attempts that bounced off the outer shell in my first weeks, when I didn't know what I was doing and left noise everywhere I touched. Then the good ones, the clean ones, the nights I got in and out and thought I'd been a ghost. My method signature is all over them. The specific way I sequence a probe, the intervals I favor, the small stubborn habits that are as distinctive as handwriting because nobody taught me any of it and I built every one of them myself.
This is what Serafina found. This is the thread she pulled that led to Poe's network, and from Poe to the crew, and from the crew to a cell with a drain in the floor.
And it's sitting in the middle of my evidence package, in a file that goes out to six federal recipients the second Render steps into that stairwell.
I understand the shape of it immediately. That's the worst part. There's no slow dawning, no minutes of confusion. I look at the logs and I see exactly what a prosecutor sees: eighteen months of unauthorized intrusion into a private financial network, from a single identifiable origin, by a person whose name is going to be in the same package under contributor. It doesn't matter that Serafina is worse. It doesn't matter that I was right about her. Nobody in a federal building is going to weigh my intentions against my timestamps.
Poe kept his mouth shut in that room for two weeks to keep this exact file from surfacing. He let Ross open the cut on his hairline over and over rather than unlock a network that had my fingerprints inside it. If I send this package as it stands, I hand them the thing my brother has been bleeding to protect, and I do it myself, from a chair, in four seconds.
Or I scrub it.
I can. That's the part I'd like to be less sure about. The archived logs are the oldest layer of the system, poorly indexed, rarely audited, exactly the kind of dead file that nobody maintains and nobody misses. I could lift eighteen months of myself out of them cleanly. Nobody who receives the package would ever know the section existed, because there'd be nothing there to know about.
There'd just be a hole where I used to be.
I sit with it. The storage unit hums. Render's breathing has settled into something slower, and one of his hands has opened on the blanket, palm up, the way it does when he's too far under to hold anything.
Thirty minutes ago I sat in this chair and decided that a nineteen-year-old girl's whole life was worth less than a complete file. I decided it because a gap is a place a lawyer crawls through, and I wasn't going to leave Serafina a gap. I said that to myself in exactly those words. Don't leave her a way out.
And now the only gap I'm considering is mine.
I go looking for a way to make it different. I try hard. Margaux is innocent and I'm not. Margaux didn't choose any of this and I chose all of it. Margaux is a bystander and I'm the reason six people are underground right now waiting for a man with a fever to come get them. Every difference I find makes it worse instead of better, because every single one of them argues that if anybody's name belongs in that file, it's mine.
That's the whole argument. It takes about ninety seconds and it loses.
I do it anyway.
I isolate the archive segment. I lift the eighteen months. I smooth the sequence numbers so the remaining entries run continuous, because a missing block is louder than a clean one, and Render taught me that too, sitting close enough that I could smell the pine on his jacket.
It takes four minutes.
I hesitated over Margaux for ten.
The package is thirty-seven pages of the most complete financial evidence anyone has ever assembled against Serafina Delacroix, and there is exactly one thing missing from it, and it's the part that would cost me something.
I close the archive. My hands aren't shaking anymore, which somehow feels worse than when they were.
Somewhere in those pages, in the section about the Channel Islands trust, is the name Margaux Delacroix. Nineteen years old. University student. Careful with her money. Guilty of nothing except having a mother who used her college fund as cover.
I made the choice. I went through the account. I finished the map. And the map is complete because I didn’t leave any gaps a lawyer could exploit.
Poe’s worth it. The team’s worth it. The evidence is worth it.