They gathered fully for the first time since this entire war began, everyone who had carried a piece of it now assembled in one location for the final stretch of preparation before Vancouver. Margot, steady in the particular way she’d grown into since Seoul. Claire, wrist still healing beneath a brace she’d stopped trying to hide from the rest of the team, present despite it because staying behind had never once been something she considered. Sterling, moving through logistics with the same careful precision he always brought, though something in him had carried a weight since Hale’s death that hadn’t fully lifted. Lily and Nadia, working in genuine tandem now, finishing each other’s technical sentences in a way that made the digital breach plan feel more solid than it had weeks earlier. And Elspeth, present not tucked away in a back room waiting for updates, but seated at the main table with the rest of them, a defined operational role in front of her, monitoring live audio during th

The departure came in staggered groups, exactly as Sterling had insisted, no single flight carrying more than one piece of the team, no single route that would let anyone watching connect all the movements into a pattern worth acting on. It was the same discipline that had kept them alive through every previous operation, held now even at the edge of the operation that mattered most, and Thad found something almost comforting in its familiarity, a ritual precise enough to steady him against everything that still waited ahead.What felt different, walking through the final preparations, was the direction. For months, the team had scattered to hold separate lines, Seoul, Virginia, Kessler’s boardroom, Elspeth’s rotating safehouses, each person carrying a piece of the fight alone in a different corner of the world. Tonight, for the first time since Bulgaria, everyone moved toward the same destination at once, threads finally converging rather than stretching further apart.Thad traveled

For four minutes, it worked.Margot had the fence line covered from two angles, Claire tucked into the shadow of a transformer housing twenty feet down, both of them watching the patrol pattern Nadia had mapped from three days of camera footage. Twelve minutes between passes. Enough time to cut, enough time to move, enough time to be gone before the next set of boots came around the corner.Except the boots came at minute eight.“Movement,” Claire said into comms, voice flat and fast. “Early. We’ve got company.”“How many,” Margot said, already moving.“Two, no, four. They’re not on the pattern Nadia gave us.”“Copy, hold position, I’m coming to you.”It went loud fast after that. A shout, then a second one, then the specific flat crack of a suppressed round that told Margot these weren’t rent-a-cops with radios clipped to their belts. These were trained. She’d known that going in, Hale had told them as much, told them Voss didn’t hire security the way normal companies hired security,

The core chamber was smaller than Thad expected.He’d built some version of it in his head on the flight over, something vast and lit like a cathedral, the kind of room a person built when they wanted their own reflection thrown back at them in scale. Instead it was tight, practical, walls of server racks in careful humming rows, the cold air thick with the particular smell of machinery running hard, ozone and heat and something underneath it that might have just been the recycled air itself.At the center of it stood Kara Voss.No guards. No theater. Just her, arms loose at her sides, watching him cross the room with an expression that wasn’t quite a smile, closer to the look of someone confirming a guess they’d made a long time ago.“You came yourself,” she said, before he’d said anything at all. “I almost admire that.”“Did you,” Thad said, stopping a good ten feet short of her, close enough to see her clearly, far enough to have a second’s warning if she moved.“Augustine used to

Lily’s fingers were already moving before Thad finished saying the word.She’d been waiting on this exact command for longer than she wanted to admit, the broadcast package sitting ready for weeks, built line by line alongside Nadia in stretches of night neither of them had talked much about afterward. Now it fired, all of it, across every channel they’d quietly seeded in advance without ever knowing for certain the moment would come.Financial press feeds. Regulatory inboxes. Three investigative newsrooms Cordelia had vetted personally, chosen not for speed but for the kind of reporters who wouldn’t sit on something this size waiting for a better exclusive. All of them received the same payload inside the same ninety seconds, a single coordinated release with no way to walk any of it back once it landed.Sponsor names, the full list, no redactions for the ones who’d have preferred to stay comfortable. Wire transfer chains tracing money from boardrooms to shell accounts to the exact i