THE GHOST INVENTOR SON-IN-LAW

Chapter 10: Seven Names

Sophia was halfway across the ballroom when her mother caught her arm.

"Sophia! Photos, darling, photos!" Helena's mascara had run, but her smile was enormous. "Dr. Reyes wants a picture with the whole family. The newspapers are here. Come, come!"

Sophia tried to pull away. "Mom, wait, I need to..."

"Whatever it is can wait. This is the most important night of your father's life!"

Helena dragged her back toward the stage, where the photographers were already lining up the Tans beside Dr. Reyes. Jason pushed himself into the middle of the picture. Bernard put his heavy arm around Philip's shoulders. Grandma Grace stood a little apart, leaning on her jade stick, saying nothing.

Sophia stood at the end of the row. Every time a flash went off, her eyes slid away from the camera and back across the room to the shadows by the sound booth.

I didn't wait for her to break free.

I pushed my empty cart through the service door, left it in the kitchen corridor and slipped out the back of the hotel into the cold night air.

Behind me, through the walls, I could hear Dr. Reyes speaking into the microphone again.

"One more thing. St. Agnes would like to give an innovation bonus of one million dollars to the person who actually wrote this software. I'm told your staff call him the Ghost Coder. If he's listening, I'd like to thank him. He can send us an account number, anonymously if he likes, and the money is his."

The guests laughed and clapped.

I walked away from the hotel and didn't look back.

The road up to Cypress Hill was long and steep, lined with old trees and quiet houses with tall gates. At night, it was almost empty. Only the streetlights watched me, humming above the road, each one run by AURA.

I took off the waiter's jacket and slung it over my shoulder. My legs felt strange, light and heavy at the same time, the way they used to feel after a mission. My hands had finally stopped shaking.

We were safe. For now. Sentinel was finished, the scanners would never roll into Tan Dynamics, and the company had sixty million dollars by the end of the week.

I sat down on a low stone wall halfway up the hill, under a streetlight, and took out my phone.

The file I'd copied from Sentinel's servers was small, only a few pages. I'd seen its name three nights ago and been too afraid to open it then.

Genesis Core Personnel. Status Update.

I opened it.

It was a list. Seven names, the seven people who had worked closest to Genesis at Site Nine. The people who had built it, fed it and watched it wake up.

I knew every single name before I read it.

Four of them were senior scientists I'd worked beside for years. Some had status notes beside them. Location unknown. Under watch. Moved overseas.

Three names had a single word beside them, in red.

Deceased.

The first one stopped my breath.

Dr. Ruth Calder. Deceased. One year ago. Cause: heart attack.

I read it again. Then again. The letters didn't change.

Ruth.

Ruth, who found a skinny kid in a parking lot and offered him a job that didn't exist. Ruth, who taught me to write code like someone's life depended on every letter. Ruth, who shouted at Mark for spilling coffee and laughed when Isaac hurt his wrist learning to punch. Ruth, who had been the closest thing I ever had to a mother.

She'd died a year ago, and nobody had told me. I'd been carrying water around a dinner table while she was being buried.

A heart attack. Ruth had walked five miles every morning, through the tunnels of Site Nine, rain or shine. She'd told me once that her heart would outlive us all out of pure stubbornness.

I pressed my fist against my mouth and sat very still until the streetlight above me blurred.

The last time I'd seen her was in the white room, the night they shut us down. She'd squeezed my hand just before the machine started humming, and she'd whispered something I couldn't hear over the noise. For three years, I'd wondered what it was. Now I'd never know.

The second red name was the one I'd expected.

Mark Ellis. Deceased. Cause: suicide.

The third was Isaac.

Isaac Brandt. Deceased. Cause: memory procedure complications.

And then, beside his name, something I didn't expect. Something so small I almost missed it. A tiny question mark, typed in grey, as if someone at the Annex had stopped halfway through updating the file and wasn't sure.

Deceased?

I stared at it until my eyes ached. Above me, the streetlight hummed and flickered once, as if it were thinking too.

Isaac had died three years ago. They'd told me so. A single line in a report. I'd mourned him in the dark for three years. Gentle Isaac, who drew equations in chalk on the lab floor when he couldn't sleep, and who once told me that a mind without a sense of right and wrong was just a very fast weapon. Why would anyone put a question mark beside a dead man's name?

I didn't know. I couldn't know, not from one small grey mark.

I closed the file and wiped my face with the back of my hand.

Mark's mother. The news story had mentioned her: Mrs. Ellis, seventy-eight, of Halbrook, who said her son had always been a good boy. She was alone now, the way Ruth had been alone at the end. The way I'd been alone for three years.

I opened a new, anonymous bank account on my phone in four minutes, at a small online bank that asked very few questions. Then I wrote a short message to St. Agnes Hospital Network, with no name at the bottom.

Thank you for the kind words. Please send the bonus here.

And underneath, a second instruction to the bank itself: when the money arrives, forward all of it to Mrs. Ellis of Halbrook, with a note.

Your son was a good man. He helped build something that was meant to save people. A friend.

I pressed send, put the phone in my pocket and stood up.

That was when I heard the engine.

It was low and quiet, a heavy van crawling up the hill behind me with its headlights off. I didn't turn around. I kept walking at the same easy pace, the jacket over my shoulder, a tired helper going home after a long night.

The engine came closer. Closer.

A black van rolled up beside me and slowed until it was moving at exactly my walking speed. Its windows were dark. There was no license plate on the front, none on the side. In the glass beside me, I could see my own reflection: a thin man in a white shirt, with cheap glasses and empty hands.

I didn't look at it, and I didn't speed up. Every muscle in my body was ready, and I didn't let a single one of them show.

Five steps. Ten. Fifteen.

Then the van's engine growled, and it sped away up the hill, around the bend and into the dark.

I stood alone in the middle of the road under the humming streetlights.

Somebody had seen me leave tonight.

And now somebody knew exactly which road I walked home on.