Mei Ling's call lasted forty-seven minutes.Jake and Sora sat in her office with the phone on speaker between them and listened to all of it. Mei Ling walked them through the parallel network architecture, the construction signatures, the comparison she'd run three times before she let herself believe what she was seeing."The person who built this is named Lin Zhao," Mei Ling said. "Corporate intelligence analyst. Eleven years working adjacent to Titan's early research partnerships. He was one of the first people to flag internally what Richard Chen was doing to Sora's father's division." A pause. "He died six years ago. Officially. Cardiac event. I verified the death certificate through two government record systems.""But," Jake said."But the network architecture is his," Mei Ling said. "I've compared it against every piece of his documented work I could access. Same structural logic. Same way of building redundancy. Same security priorities. I know how he builds things because I'

They booked commercial flights at six AM and were at the airport by eight.Sora had suggested commercial on the cab ride over and Jake hadn't argued. Private created records. Records created questions. Questions created timelines that Carter's people could work backward from."Window or aisle?" Sora asked at the check-in queue."Aisle," Jake said."Good. I wanted the window."They flew in the kind of silence that didn't need filling. Sora had her laptop open for most of it. Jake read through Mei Ling's Lin Zhao files and tried to build a picture of what a man who had been officially dead for six years actually looked like in person.'You're going to meet him at some point,' the Whisperer said.'One thing at a time,' Jake thought.***They landed at noon. Vancouver was grey and cool and smelled like rain that had stopped about an hour before they arrived. They took a cab to the hotel in comfortable silence, checked in at the front desk, and the receptionist handed them two keycards.Tw

Park looked at his tea for a moment. Then at Sora. Then he set the cup down like he was setting something else down at the same time."Your father built something real," he said. "Before Richard. Before any of this. The research division existed because of his work and everyone who was actually there in those early years knew it." He paused. "He had a way of making people want to solve problems they didn't even know they had yet. That's rare. I've worked with a lot of people. That's genuinely rare.""How did Richard get in?" Sora said."Your father brought him in," Park said. "That's the part I think about most. He vouched for Richard himself. Two other people he trusted also vouched for him. And for the first three years none of us had a reason to think anything was wrong. Richard was brilliant. He was useful. He worked hard." Park looked at his hands. "Then your father got sick.""The first illness," Sora said."Yes. Not the one that eventually." Park stopped. Started again. "He had

The flight home was quiet for the first hour.Sora had her laptop closed on her lap, looking out the window. Jake had a coffee he wasn't drinking.Neither of them brought up the parking garage. Or Grace. Or the half second where Sora's hand had been on his arm and Jake had stepped back like he'd touched something hot.Or the hotel room. Nobody was bringing that up either.'You're going to have to talk about that eventually,' the Whisperer said.'Not on a plane,' Jake thought.'You said the same thing about the hotel room.''Different reasons,' Jake thought.'Were they though,' the Whisperer said. 'Because if you'd stayed five more minutes in that room I don't think either of you would have made it to the David Park meeting on schedule.''We are never discussing this,' Jake thought.'I'm just doing the math,' the Whisperer said. 'You had the door open. She had her hand on your chest. If I had to guess a timeline—''I will sit in complete silence for the rest of this flight if that's wh

On the plane Sora took the window seat without asking. Jake took the aisle.The first hour was quiet. Sora's laptop stayed shut on her lap. Jake scrolled through messages he wasn't really reading."You never explained the garage," Sora said. She was looking out the window, not at him."I know.""So explain it."Jake set his phone down. "Carter knows things about us that nobody outside our circle should know," he said. "If he or someone working with him goes looking for a way to hurt me, you're the obvious place to look. Not because you're weak. Because everyone can see what you mean to this team."Sora turned from the window. "And stepping away from me in a garage stops that exactly how.""I don't know that it does," Jake said."So why'd you do it.""Because I keep thinking about Victor and Elena," Jake said. "How he used her. How close that came to going somewhere we couldn't pull back from." He looked at his hands. "I don't want to be the reason something like that happens to you."