Harry came back to consciousness slowly, his head pounding, his mouth dry and thick in a way that told him whatever they'd used on him hadn't fully worn off yet. He lay still for a moment, trying to piece together where he was, the ceiling above him unfamiliar, bare concrete instead of anything he recognized.He tried to sit up and found his body sluggish and heavy, his limbs not quite responding the way he wanted them to. The room around him came into focus slowly. Small, windowless, a single bare bulb overhead, a metal door on the far wall. No furniture except the thin mat he was lying on.The last clear memory he had was the road. The cars boxing him in. Rough hands pulling him from his own vehicle.The door opened before he could get much further with the thought, and two men in dark clothing gestured for him to get up, their expressions blank and businesslike in a way that unsettled him more than open hostility would have. He forced himself upright, his legs unsteady beneath him,

They were marched out of the compound an hour later, blinking against sudden daylight after so long in the windowless room, and Harry got his first real look at where they actually were.The island stretched out before them, vast and dense, thick forest rolling away toward distant hills, the air thick with humidity and the sound of unfamiliar birds calling somewhere overhead. This wasn't a small, contained space. This was something closer to a small country, sprawling and wild, the kind of terrain that could swallow five people whole and never give them back.Two men stood waiting near a low, sturdy building that looked like some kind of staging post, both dressed in practical outdoor gear, rifles slung casually over their shoulders with the ease of men who'd carried them a hundred times before."This is Silas," Tyrone said, gesturing to the taller of the two, a lean man with a weathered face and pale, unreadable eyes. "And Roman." The second man nodded once, shorter and broader, his

Harry lay awake long after the others had finally succumbed to exhausted sleep, staring up at the crude canopy of branches and leaves above him, listening to Sophie's soft, uneven breathing beside Elena, to Desmond's occasional shift as he kept his restless watch near the shelter's opening. He thought about the day ahead, and the nine that would follow it if they were lucky enough to survive that long. He thought about Sophie, twelve years old, dragged into a grown man's grief and fury through no fault of her own, curled up small and frightened a few feet away. He thought about Desmond's steady, exhausted competence, about Elena's sharp, guarded fear, about Victor's trembling uncertainty. He thought about how completely, utterly unprepared he was to keep any of them alive. He'd spent weeks now proving to himself, to Melissa, to everyone who mattered, that he didn't need the System anymore. That he'd grown past the wealth and the leverage and the safety net, that he could stand on h

Harry woke before dawn to a faint sound that shouldn't have registered at all, a distant rustle of movement through brush far beyond the range anyone else in the shelter could have possibly heard. He lay still, listening, feeling the strange new clarity of his senses sort through it carefully. Footsteps, several sets, moving with purpose but not urgency, still a considerable distance away.He nudged Desmond awake gently. "Someone's coming. Not close yet, but moving in this direction."Desmond was alert instantly, the kind of fast, practiced wakefulness that came from years of training Harry still hadn't asked him directly about. "How do you know that? I don't hear anything.""I don't know," Harry said, which was mostly true. "Just a feeling. We should move."Desmond studied him for a moment, something assessing in his gaze, and then nodded, apparently deciding the source of the warning mattered less than the warning itself. He woke Elena and Sophie quietly, and the group gathered what

Kathryn's desk had disappeared beneath a spread of case files by the time the sun came up, folders stacked three deep, photographs and financial printouts scattered across every available inch of surface. She hadn't slept, running purely on coffee and the particular, focused adrenaline of finally having a thread worth pulling after two years of dead ends. "Here," she said, pulling out a folder and setting it in front of Melissa, who'd refused to leave despite Kathryn's repeated suggestions that she go home and rest. "This one. A businessman named Aldric Fenn, disappeared eighteen months ago. Crossed the wrong people in a land dispute, according to what little we ever pieced together. Never found, never heard from again." Melissa stared at the photograph clipped to the file, a middle aged man smiling at some forgotten camera, utterly unaware of whatever fate had eventually found him. "You think he's connected to this. To Tyrone." "I think there's a financial thread," Kathryn said, p