Sterling argued against it the entire drive, not loudly, but steadily, the way he argued everything he thought mattered enough to keep repeating. “You oversee relocations from a distance. That’s the protocol. That’s always been the protocol, especially now, especially after Petrov.”“I know the protocol.”“Then you know why it exists. If the System or Voss is watching your pattern closer than we think, showing up in person to move her yourself is the single fastest way to hand them exactly what they’re looking for.”Thad kept his eyes on the road, hands steady on the wheel, and did not pretend the argument wasn’t sound. “I’m not debating whether it’s risky. I already decided it was worth the risk before I called you.”Sterling let out a breath through his nose, frustrated but out of new angles, and said nothing else about it for the rest of the drive.The new safehouse sat at the end of a gravel road outside a small town whose name Thad made himself forget as soon as he heard it, a lo

They gathered properly for the first time since Bulgaria, five windows again on the screen but this time with Sterling and Lily sharing a room in person, a rare concession to the seriousness of what needed saying rather than any real improvement in security. Thad stood rather than sat, something in him needing the posture of it, and laid out where they actually stood without softening any of it for the room.“Vanguard’s bleeding out on a schedule Kessler’s people are watching now, closer every week. We lost Petrov outside Bratislava, staged to look random and clearly wasn’t. A probe reached toward Elspeth’s old location before we moved her. And we’ve got a live thread running into Seoul that ties Augustine’s history directly to whatever Voss has built. That’s where we stand.”Nobody spoke for a moment, the weight of it settling differently across five separate rooms.“I want to say something out loud that I think we’ve all been circling without naming,” Sterling said finally, and some

The names on their documents this time belonged to a consulting couple scouting infrastructure investment opportunities across East Asia, close enough to the truth to hold up under casual scrutiny, boring enough that no one at immigration gave them a second look. Thad had worn a dozen identities over the last several years, but this one sat differently, not because the cover itself was harder to maintain, but because of who was standing beside him wearing the matching half of it.Working this closely with Margot again, without Claire’s steady presence or Sterling’s careful planning as a buffer between them, forced something neither of them had fully addressed since the divorce papers and the torn check outside the prison gate. They had rebuilt something since then, out of necessity more than choice at first, and neither had stopped to name exactly what it had become. Not romantic. He was certain of that, certain enough that he never even let the thought linger long enough to examine i

The access came through faster than Thad expected, arranged by Joon-ho with the eager helpfulness of a man who still believed he was courting foreign investment rather than walking two strangers directly toward the center of something he had never fully examined. Supervised access, framed as investment due diligence, badges printed with names that weren’t theirs, an escort waiting at the door who introduced herself as part of the research communications team, warm and proud in a way that put Thad immediately on edge for reasons he couldn’t yet name.He had expected, walking in, something closer to what Bulgaria had prepared him for, cold rooms, guarded doors, an atmosphere that announced its own wrongness even before the details confirmed it. What he found instead unsettled him in a different way entirely. The building was bright, open, filled with young researchers moving between clean workstations with the particular energy of people who believed deeply in the value of what they wer

He couldn’t sleep after Voss left, the conversation looping in his head long after Margot had finally given up trying to talk it through further and gone quiet on the other bed, her breathing slow but not fully steady, telling him she wasn’t fully asleep either. Around three in the morning he gave up pretending rest was coming and pulled up the encrypted archive Sterling had built years ago from Vanguard’s earliest, most private files, records from before Thad had ever set foot in Riverbend, back when Augustine still ran the company himself, unburdened by the version of the story Thad had inherited secondhand from a dying man’s final months.He searched slowly at first, unsure exactly what he was looking for, only that something in Voss’s certainty tonight had felt too specific to be invention. Personnel records. Strategic partnership files. Old memos between departments that no longer existed under names Thad barely recognized. And then, buried three folders deep in a section marked