17 — Decrypted

The ultimate hubris of centralised planning is the belief that the planners themselves are infallible. A truly self-correcting system must have protocols to protect itself not just from external shocks, but from the rational, well-intentioned, and catastrophic errors of its own leadership.

—Naomi Feld, Systemic Integrity and the Harmonious State

Benjamin sat on the tall stool in the workshop in what he now thought of as Ari’s corner. He’d been coming here since the Gathering. Since Ari and Santo.

In front of him, on the workbench scarred with burns and scratches, lay his walker-talker. The black plastic casing was cracked, the antenna bent and its rubber sleeve split open. He picked up a small jeweller’s screwdriver and jammed it at one of the tiny screws in the casing. His hand slipped, his palm slick with sweat, making the smooth plastic driver hard to grip. The screwdriver’s tip bounced as it spun uselessly in the stripped screw head.

Ari would have known how to fix it. He’d have turned the unit over once in his hands, smiled like the stripped screw was only being stubborn, and got it open. But Ari was gone. His father had traded him. Benjamin blinked hard and jabbed futilely at the screw again.

In his frustration, he slammed the screwdriver down hard on the workbench. The sound was sharp, even over the steady hiss-and-thump of the air compressor that vibrated up into his body through the stool’s legs. The air smelled of sawdust and old wiring, but it couldn’t cover the damp stone smell that always clung to the workshop.

His gaze drifted to the failures pile in the far corner, under its flickering tube light. A cracked CGS info-screen, a tangle of melted server racks, a nest of boards with their copper traces burned black. His stomach tightened. He couldn’t fix what his father had done. Couldn’t fix Santo’s empty seat. Couldn’t even free one bloody screw.

From the far side of the room came a grating shing-shing-shing of someone filing metal. From the darkest corner, the rhythmic drip… tink… drip… tink of water striking sheet metal felt like it was hammering inside his own head. His elbows on the workbench, Benjamin rubbed his knuckles into his lidded eyes.

A heavy cardboard box dropped onto the bench beside him, the impact making Benjamin and the tiny spare screws jump.

“Heard you broke your toy.”

Benjamin’s head snapped up. Dax stood there, leaning against the bench with a casual arrogance. He wore a patched utility vest, and the faint blue-white light of the cybernetic tracings on his temple pulsed softly.

“It’s not a toy,” Benjamin muttered, returning his attention to the stripped screw.

“That was a bloody mess, that Gathering,” Dax said, his voice softening just a fraction. “What happened with Santo and then your topside friend. That’s not how it should’ve gone.”

Benjamin said nothing, his knuckles white on the screwdriver.

“Right,” Dax said. He nudged the box. “Well, your non-toy is busted. Found these in a scrap haul from the old Holborn depot. Thought maybe you could use these parts to fix it.”

Benjamin looked inside. The box was a small graveyard of broken parts, three or four more walker-talkers, all in various states of disrepair. One missing its battery cover, another’s casing warped by heat.

“They’re broken, too,” Benjamin said.

“Tch,” Dax said with a small grin. “Better a box of broken bits you can use than one perfect thing you’re afraid will get scratched. Know what I mean?”

He pushed himself off the bench and began to prowl the small space, picking up a spool of copper wire, testing its weight. “Your dad’s a legend, kid. Smartest man I know. But he’s too careful. He says it because he plays the long game. Me?” Dax tapped his temple. “I see a problem right in front of me, I like to solve it.”

“My first Gathering,” Dax continued, his voice dropping, as if letting Benjamin in on a secret, “we got cornered. A CGS security drone had us pinned in a maintenance tunnel with only a small shaft out. The leader, one of Charles’s soft boys, said to dump the gear and run for it.”

“Run for it?” Dax scoffed, tossing the wire spool back onto a shelf. “On my first Gathering? I told him bugger that. I made some real noise. Gave a high-pressure gas main a taste of my cutter. Heard the high-pitched shriek of the metal giving way. The stink of it, you know, that rotten smell that chokes you. Then, BOOM!” Dax shouted and Benjamin flinched. “The whole bloody tunnel came down. Blocked the drone, blocked the patrol that was on its way. Total chaos. The drone went dark, and the patrol got reassigned to work the collapse. We just climbed out the other side with all the gear.” He grinned, a quick, feral flash of teeth.

Dax leaned in closer to Benjamin. “See? That’s the thing. Sometimes you gotta make a little noise, remind ’em you’re here. That’s how you win.”

Just then, Benjamin saw Timmy’s heavy shadow fall over the bench. Dax spotted him too. He straightened up, a cocky smirk spreading across his face as his right hand dropped to the grip of the taser holstered on his thigh. In his left hand he held a pneumatic driver he’d been idly fiddling with while talking, its pressure cuff hissing, the coupling rattling loose in its socket.

“Isn’t that right, Timmy?” Dax said, loud enough to be a challenge. “Or is thinking not part of the job?”

Timmy’s gaze shifted to Dax. He didn’t move. He just looked, his eyes flat and cold. Then, with a deliberate slowness that made Benjamin’s skin prickle, he took the hissing pneumatic driver from Dax. With a decisive motion of his thumb and a definitive thunk, he reseated the air-feed coupling. The hissing stopped. He placed the now-functional tool back on the bench.

For a long moment, the workshop’s noises became background to fill the stand-off’s silence. Dax’s cocky smile tightened then faltered.

When Timmy finally spoke, his voice was a gravelly rumble, like stones grinding together. “All your noise does,” he said, “is tell ‘em where to shoot.”

Dax’s hand tightened on his taser. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Charles’s father was like you,” Timmy said. He didn’t raise his voice. “Made a lot of noise after the CGS let Charles’s mum die. Got himself recycled fast.”

Dax’s hand left his taser and fell to his side. Dax just stared at Timmy, his jaw tight. He opened his mouth, then closed it. With a disgusted look at Benjamin, Dax grabbed his box. “A right waste of time,” he spat, and shoved the box back at Benjamin, waggling the contents. “Keep ’em. Or don’t.”

He stomped out of the workshop, his footsteps echoing his anger.

Timmy watched him go. Then his gaze lingered for a moment on Benjamin, a flicker of something in their depths. Assessment? Pity? Benjamin couldn’t tell. Then, silent as he’d arrived, he turned and was gone, a giant shadow disappearing back into the tunnels.

Benjamin was alone again. The workshop noises seemed closer.

He looked at the chaotic jumble of parts in the box. Noise tells ’em where to shoot. He looked at his own, single, broken unit. Got himself recycled fast.

He jabbed the screwdriver at the stripped screw, his knuckles white. Dax was wrong. Making noise just broke things more. It was stupid. But his father was wrong, too. He wasn’t cautious with Ari, he just threw him away. Like he was rubbish. Like he was part of the failures pile.

Benjamin looked in the box at the pile of parts. He wouldn’t be like Dax, all loud and smashing. And he wouldn’t be like his father, giving up on people. He picked up the broken walker-talker Ari had given him. What if Ari was still out there, somewhere? What if he tried to call? Benjamin would make sure it worked. Just in case.

He pushed his stripped unit aside. He reached into the box and pulled out a different walker-talker. He found the right-sized driver on Ari’s magnetic rack. With a slow, steady hand, he undid the screws on the back casing. It came free with a satisfying click.

He carefully lifted the circuit board from the casing. It was beautiful. The bright green of it, the silver beads of solder like tiny jewels, the paper-thin copper lines that were a map to a logical world. A world that made sense. His eyes traced the delicate pathways that Ari knew how to read.

He would take the antenna from one. He would find a good battery in another. He would salvage the speaker from a third. It wouldn’t be perfect. It would be a mix, a new thing made from broken bits.

---

A centrifuge wound down somewhere to Sharon’s left, its volume and pitch dropping in tune with its momentum. Before long, the escaped hiss of a steriliser took its place. At the far bench someone snapped a pipette tip into place too hard. A muffled curse followed. Cold blue light from the lab equipment displays washed the steel benches, turning everyone thin and spectral. Air scrubbers droned overhead.

Sharon barely noticed the activity around her in the lab at the Francis Crick Institute where the small group of hand-picked micro-biologists and lab assistants were working on blocking the prion per her instructions. She was sifting through the medical data Alene had unlocked for her—symptom onset, age, co-morbidities, service histories, mortality windows. At first she had thought the prion’s origin could be found using temporal data, then demographic, then geographic. Each pattern identified a reasonably narrow source, only to collapse under the next layer.

Her neck ached at her shoulders. The skin beneath her eyes felt hot and puffy. Coffee sat at the edge of the bench in a chipped mug, gone cold enough for a milk-protein membrane to coagulate into a film floating on the surface.

She stripped out age variance. The cluster dissolved. She rebuilt using onset timing. It returned promising results, then fell apart the moment she restored service histories. She removed onset timing and weighted for district density. No clear results.

“Dr Feld?”

Sharon looked up sharply. “What now?”

Mara stood three feet away with a tablet in one hand and a nitrile glove half peeled off the other. Behind her, Tomas and Lian were having a disagreement over a culture tray, both of them whisper-shouting.

Mara held up the tablet. “The sympathetic dampening trials. Batch twelve is drifting again. Not enough to scrap, but enough that if you want consistency—”

“Raise the lower threshold by zero point four and rerun the comparator against batch nine.”

Mara frowned. “That’ll flatten the response curve.”

“It will flatten the false optimism,” Sharon said. “Run it and we’ll see.”

Mara nodded and turned away, snapping the glove back over her wrist as she went.

Sharon went back to the records. One victim in Lambeth had shown symptom onset two days before a man in Hackney. A woman in Southwark presented almost a full day after both of them despite overlapping district movement and comparable co-morbidities. If exposure had been ambient, the progression would have spread with less rhythm. Instead it kept clustering and unclustering as though she were looking at several separate disturbances overlaid badly enough to imitate randomness.

She pinched one pane wider and pulled facility access logs beside onset timings. Clinics, distribution centres, approved home-monitoring routes. She narrowed the window and it locked in on three facilities. She stilled, fingertips hovering above the console. Then she widened the frame by twelve hours, and the cluster came apart. Sharon swore under her breath. A false pattern. Or a real one assembled in the wrong order.

She rebuilt from the top. The same three facilities surfaced again, but only if she weighted onset first. When she reordered by district traffic, they vanished. When she stripped district movement and weighted by service date, two remained, one dropped out, and a fourth surfaced in a different borough. So the buildings were not carrying it alone.

At the far bench someone swore again, louder this time.

“Watch your sterility,” Sharon snapped without turning.

The swearing stopped.

She stared at the panes until the lines blurred, then sharpened again. The facilities were the first visible shape. The contact around them might be the mechanism beneath it.

A movement near the door caught her eye. Hatch stood, dark coat buttoned, hands clasped behind his back with the careful stillness of a man trying not to take up space. The overhead wash caught at the seam of his jacket. His gaze moved over the lab without wandering.

“Hatch.” Sharon flicked her hand, motioning him over.

He was beside her a moment later, careful but not hesitant.

“I need a data analyst,” she said. “Isn’t that what you do when you’re not confining biologists in their homes and labs?”

“Protection, ma’am, and yes, that’s mostly what I do at the Yard.”

“Fine,” she said. “Stand there and tell me whether I’ve started forcing this.” Sharon pointed at her terminal.

His eyebrows lifted once. “If you like, ma’am, but I know next to nothing about biology.”

“It’s not biology.”

She opened the panes wider with a sharp movement of her hand. Symptom onset records expanded into vertical bands. District maps rotated with facility histories slotted beneath them. Her pale reflection floated across the glass in front of the data.

“Tissue samples suggest many localised exposures rather than a single origin event,” she said. “Onset timing is inconsistent if spread is ambient, but not inconsistent enough to be random. Every time I strip this back I get a coherent clustering around a small set of facilities, then I lose it when I restore the other parameters.”

“Ma’am, not to be rude, but this is classified data.” Hatch looked down at her. “Where did you get this?”

Sharon stared at him above the rim of her glasses. “Think about it, Hatch. Consider why you and I are both here.”

Hatch chewed his lip, then nodded. He leaned in to study the panes.

He said, “You’re weighting from symptom onset.”

“Yes.”

He glanced at her. “The pandemic started less than two months ago, why are you looking at data from four years back?”

“Because more recent data gave me nothing,” Sharon said. “Prions can have very long incubation periods.”

“Ah,” he said. He pointed at the display. “If not the facilities themselves, maybe it’s what happened in them.”

Before she could answer, Tomas appeared at her other side with a sample rack in both hands, as though it might strengthen his argument.

“Dr Feld, if Lian keeps the damaged cultures in rotation, the contamination model becomes useless.”

Lian followed half a step behind him, mask hanging loose at one ear. “They are not contaminated. The membrane’s destabilising under heat stress.”

“Because you set it too high,” Tomas said.

“Because we need to test that too,” Lian snapped.

Sharon closed her eyes for one second.

“Discard half, isolate half, and stop narrating your grievances at each other like bickering children,” she said.

They vanished without replying.

She turned back to Hatch. “Continue.”

“If the facility pattern keeps breaking,” he said, “keep the facilities loose and the nature of contact tight.”

“Meaning?”

“Not where,” he added. “What sort of interaction it was—adjustment, pickup, treatment, home visit. Whatever categories you’ve got.”

The idea was simple enough to be annoying. She turned back to the display and reordered the query. The panes thinned. Clinics, distribution hubs, mobile teams, home-monitoring logs. She relaxed her eyes while the map lost half its clutter and noticed the black edge of the terminal, worn where years of wrists had polished it.

A line of correspondences blinked into existence. She widened the interval. The line sharpened. Her pulse gave a single hard beat. She tightened the frame by two months to test for false clustering. Two points dropped out. She widened again. Several returned from different districts, but under the same service category. The location kept changing. The contact type did not.

“Look at that,” Hatch said with a half-smile.

Sharon reintroduced co-morbidities, but the pattern persisted. She reintroduced age variance, then district density. It survived them too.

A junior researcher approached at speed from the cardiac bench, face shield pushed up, tablet hugged to her chest. “Dr Feld, the pacing simulations—”

“Not now.”

“It’s the implant-tolerance model. We need your sign-off before—”

“Not. Now.”

The girl retreated, trainers squeaking once on the polished floor.

Sharon split the surviving cohort by contact type and overlaid onset windows against the tissue-sample chronology Alene had given her. This time the staggered exposures did not look like noise. They looked routed through ordinary contact with the medical network. A repeated band of service interactions recurred across a broad set of facilities.

Sharon sat back half an inch. The lab seemed, for a moment, ostensibly unchanged—glass, blue light, air scrubbers, someone muttering over a reagent tray. The plastic click of a pipette ejector.

“Hatch,” she said quietly.

“I see it too.”

It was not exact, but when she pushed at the variables it stayed coherent longer before it broke.

Mara reappeared at the edge of her vision. “Threshold shift improved the stability,” she said, then stopped when she saw Sharon’s face. “Should I—”

“Yes,” Sharon said automatically.

Mara waited.

Sharon blinked, dragged herself partway back into the room. “Yes, keep going. And freeze all comparative logs from batch twelve.”

Mara nodded and left.

Only when she was gone did Sharon realise her own hands were trembling against the edge of the terminal.

Hatch spoke at last. “That’s not random infection.”

“No,” Sharon said. “Exposure during medical service.”

He nodded once. He said, “That—”

“Not enough. I know,” she said. “Not for a distribution mechanism. We don’t know whether it’s in treatment supplies, packaging, scheduling, or something else. We know only that people are touching the system before they get sick, and not at random.”

Hatch looked at the panes. “I was going to say, that warrants investigation.”

Sharon gave a brief, humourless laugh. She collapsed the wider displays, locked the extracted correlations into a local encrypted block.

“This cannot go into a formal channel,” she said.

He nodded.

“You know what the consequences are if this gets out?”

Another nod. No questions.

Sharon looked at him properly. In the hard lab light he seemed younger than she remembered from Southwark, but steadier too. He had not yet finished becoming whatever he would be, but she could see why Alene trusted him.

She wouldn’t give this information to Francis. Not yet. It was still only pattern, not proof, and Francis handled uncertainty decisively. Sharon understood the cost of that more clearly now.

“You’ll get it securely where it needs to go?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am.” His expression altered by less than a degree.

“Good,” she said. “See to it.”

He hesitated. “Do you need protection on this terminal?”

“I need everyone in this lab to survive the next seventy-two hours,” she said. “That will do for now.”

He inclined his head and stepped back from the console.

At the far bench, Lian called for a seal check. Tomas answered with clipped irritation. A monitor chimed. Mara was speaking to a lab tech.

Sharon stood motionless for one breath, then reopened the cure models—cardiac pacing, dampening thresholds, tissue tolerance. A translucent heart rotated above the bench, its conductive pathways lit in soft green filaments, one ventricle flickering amber where the model still failed.

“Batch ten results review at my bench in 5 minutes,” she called.

---

Ari had coded the Vauxhall safe house terminal to only show intercepted transmissions in Mandarin, isolating their target’s signal from other Council traffic and the usual drone of governance. Now, all they could do was wait.

Ari stared at the terminal, fizzing under the skin. He paced the small room, the smooth polymer slick under his boots. His footsteps kept needling the silence, stirring the recycled air and the stale musk of dried sweat. He sat again and drummed an arrhythmic beat on the terminal casing.

Alene sat on the table opposite him, long legs crossed, hands gripping the edge, patience in her face with a line of wry amusement under it. She had gone very still. His own nervous energy seemed to strike her and fall away.

“So,” she said, her voice a soft murmur, “we wait.”

He shifted in his chair. The silence, the waiting, her steady gaze, all of it kept tightening around him. “We wait,” he agreed, his voice pinched thin.

She moved closer along the table. He got up at once and put the terminal between them. She crossed to the sofa instead.

“So,” she said, “what shall we do while we wait?” She leaned back, propping herself up on her elbows, her body a long line in the harsh, fluorescent light.

He had no grip on who she truly was and that was bad enough. Worse was wanting to close the distance. Old damage answered at once, a full-body recoil he knew too well. Intimacy left wreckage. None of that stopped the pull. He looked at the light in her green eyes and felt heat gather under his skin. Want rose first, then guilt, the two braided too tightly to prise apart.

How many days had it even been since they met? She had been the officer who took him into custody. First handcuffs, then a locked room. Then the assault, his first kill, and whatever had been forged between them there. Then the things they had told each other that should have stayed buried. And what were they now? Captor and prisoner? Partners? Confidants? Too much had changed too fast.

But the frantic rush had stopped and now he was forced to sit still with the charge of it inside him. All he wanted was somewhere to hide, not from the danger, or the developers, but from what was surfacing in him around Alene.

“I think we should rest. I know I could use it,” he said, his voice strained and hollow. “Wake me if something happens, yeah?”

He went to his room and lay down, heart hammering against his ribs, pulse too loud in his ears. Desire and dread kept crossing their wires until he could not separate them.

He must have drifted off, his exhaustion finally overwhelming the jittery, adrenaline-charged current that had been driving him. He was woken by Alene’s hand on his shoulder, her touch a gentle, yet insistent pressure that pulled him back from the dreamless depths of sleep.

“Ari,” she whispered. “It’s them.”

He was instantly awake. The holo communique was active, the images of the two conspirators coalescing in the air above the terminal. This time, the connection was clear, the signal strong, the images sharp and stable.

The Asian man was facing them, his face composed with aristocratic calm. The English speaker, however, had her back to them, silhouetted against the ambient light of her own unseen room.

“How are things progressing?” the Asian man asked in Mandarin, his voice loud and present, as if he were standing right in front of them.

“We’re already approaching half a billion dead,” the English speaker replied, and the voice, now clear and undistorted, was entirely familiar. Its tone and cadence triggered a catastrophic failure in Ari’s core, stealing the air from his lungs.

“No, it can’t be,” Ari whispered.

“These demonstrations are beginning to get out of hand, though,” the Asian man said.

Alene and Ari approached the holo, an apprehensive creeping dance around the terminal to get a better angle, to see the face of the English speaker they had already identified.

“I know,” the English voice replied. “Many of them have become disastrous riots.”

They reached the side of the terminal, and the silhouette turned, her face coming into view. Her image, a construct of sharp, stable light, painted the opposite wall in a shifting glow and cast their own faces in shadow.

“Oh, bugger all,” Ari breathed, the words a small, pathetic whimper of disbelief.

“It’s Francis Herbert,” Alene whispered. Her usual, focused stillness had become brittle. Her hand had instinctively dropped to her hip, to the place where her sidearm would normally be.

“We have to do something about it,” the Asian man was saying.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Francis replied with weary, pragmatic resolve. “The pace was necessary to reach the population target.”

“Still, if the demonstrations get any worse, this problem may grow to be larger than we planned.”

“I have something that can help, but I need it confirmed. We’ll talk again when I know more,” she said.

The holos dissolved. Ari stared at the empty space where Francis’s image had been. The woman who had taken him in after his parents died and who had been his boss and mentor.

“I can’t believe it,” he whispered.

Through the static he felt something tugging at him, someone saying his name, palms on the side of his face, fingers in his hair.

“Ari! Hey, come back to me.”

He came out of the haze to find Alene’s face close to his, her eyes focused. Her expression was taut. “Ari,” she said, her voice clinical. “We don’t know if what we saw means what we think it does.”

Ari grasped at the potential vindication. “What? Why?”

“Because,” she said, low and analytical, “it’s one data point. One voice on one line. What if she’s playing some other political game? What if it wasn’t her in the first transmission?” She gestured at the empty air where the holos had been. “It gives us suspicion, not certainty. We need to establish motive.”

He could only nod. A part of him wanted Francis to be innocent—the part that was still twelve years old. And maybe Alene was right. They needed to know for certain.

He sat down at the terminal, his hands trembling. “Let me check something.”

“What are you looking for?” Alene asked.

“Motive,” he said, his fingers flying, already running search queries against the CGS archive. “She mentioned population targets.”

The terminal chimed, not with a file, but with a restricted log entry. “Sod it,” Ari muttered. “Part of the archive index is corrupted. Hold on.”

He brought the corrupted data up on the main holo, filling the wall with a cascade of glitching, incoherent code. The wall of flickering blue-white light reflected on their faces like data-corrupted masks.

“The header is scrambled. It’s junk. I can’t rebuild the pointer…” He trailed off, staring at the wall of noise, hitting a dead end. Alene stepped up beside him, scanning the wall of data.

“No,” she said. “It’s not just junk. Look.” She pointed to a section. “Line 404, 501, 612. It’s a repeating data fragment. It’s not shredded, Ari. It’s encrypted with a sloppy, repeating key.”

Ari stared at the fragment she’d isolated. “Yes. Yes, I can use that.”

He isolated the key Alene had found and ran a decryption script against the corrupted file. A few tense seconds passed. “Got it,” he said, a grim satisfaction in his voice. “Bypassing the redaction protocol now.”

A file flickered into existence. “It’s minutes from the health committee’s meetings from when Herbert was on it,” he said. He brought it up. A small holo of the committee meeting, the figures no more than twenty centimetres high, appeared on the desk. A slightly younger-looking Francis Herbert was standing, addressing the group.

“We’ve checked all the possibilities,” the holo of Francis said, her voice tinny, a distorted echo of the warm, maternal tones he knew so well. “The problem isn’t just agriculture. It’s all of the resources that we have on earth. Even with all the recycling and technology we have, at the current growth rate we won’t be able to survive into the 22nd century. The bottom line is, there are just too many people in this world.”

He looked at Alene, horror turning in his gut. The proof was digitally encoded in Francis’s own voice. The motive was logical and efficient, just like the councillor herself. He recoiled from the little holo on the desk as if it were hot, backing into the sofa and dropping onto it. The last flicker of denial went out.

“It’s her,” Ari whispered, the words hollow. “The motive, the ideology, it was her all along.” He stared at the wall, his reality compiling itself around the fact and failing.

Alene was pacing, thumb and forefinger at her chin. “It’s too clean, Ari. The holo was too clean, almost like a performance. And maybe this file wasn’t just deleted. It almost feels left for someone to find—damaged enough to look hidden. It’s too perfect. What if the minutes are real, but the holo was planted? Maybe someone is framing her.”

“Framing her?” The idea was an escape hatch. Ari lunged for it, but it wasn’t real. “No, not her. She’s too powerful for that and the motive tracks with her convictions. It’s her.”

Alene stopped pacing and met his gaze, her expression unyielding. “Possibly, and if she’s guilty, we found her motive. Right now, we have two data points pointing directly at her. We have to operate as if both are valid until we have evidence to the contrary.”

Ari dropped his head back onto the sofa’s backrest and stared at the ceiling.

“We can’t go to the Council,” Alene said, “and we can’t go to my superiors. This is too big, any part of the chain could be compromised. We’re holding a grenade, and we don’t know if the pin was pulled by Francis or by the person who gave it to us.”

Ari listened to her, his own mind still fragging. She was already running scenarios while he was barely holding a complete packet.

Alene stopped pacing. “The warrant. The one I used to tap the line.”

“What about it?”

“It came from Justice William Baron,” she said.

Ari’s head snapped up. “Baron? From Walker Affairs.”

“He’s Judiciary,” Alene continued. “He’s not Council, not part of Francis’s operational structure. He’s the one who authorised the surveillance in the first place.”

“Alene, no.” Ari’s voice was a croak. “He’s the last person we can trust. He’s the one Charles betrayed me to. He’s probably the reason Santo is…” He couldn’t finish the sentence.

Alene met his gaze, her own unflinching. “I know who he is, Ari. He is also the only official with the authority we need who is already invested in this investigation. It’s a clean procedural line. It’s the only move we have.”

“It’s a hell of a risk,” Ari said.

“It’s a risk either way,” Alene said, her face set in grim resolve. “If we do nothing, we’re compromised already. If we go to the wrong person, we’re dead. Baron is the only path I see that isn’t an immediate dead end. He has the authority. We have to try.”

“It feels like walking into a trap,” Ari said, his hands clenching.

“Everything from here is a trap,” Alene countered. “I’m choosing the one I can see. We’re calling him.”

Alene sat down at the terminal. She hit a button. Ari stepped back, his arms crossed, his entire body rigid with distrust.

The holo image of Justice Baron appeared in the room.

“DCI Ardone,” Baron said. He was seated at his desk. “This is unexpected.”

Ari watched the man on the holo. The signal was perfect, the audio clean, the entire image warmer and more polished than the committee record had been. Baron appeared steady, his eyes stayed bright and hard.

“Justice Baron,” Alene began, “I’ve intercepted a holo conversation regarding the developers of the pandemic. It confirms that there is indeed a conspiracy. But that’s not the worst part. Francis Herbert is implicated as a co-conspirator.”

The Justice sat up. His brows drew together. “I can’t believe it.” He leaned forward. “That’s a very serious allegation against the highest-ranking official in Britannia.” He shook his head. “Francis Herbert? It’s unthinkable. Are you absolutely certain of your source?”

“The source was a direct, encrypted transmission, Justice Baron, from the warrant you authorised,” Alene said. “And we’ve found corroborating evidence. Minutes from a health committee she chaired that point to motive. She’s culling the herd to protect it.”

Baron was silent for a moment, fingers steepled in front of him. “I’m truly shocked. Still,” he paused for a beat. “While calculated and horrific, it is not wholly inconsistent with other measures she has taken to protect the CGS’s peace.” His gaze settled on Ari. “And you, Mr Feld. You were Councillor Herbert’s protégé, were you not? Her foster son. This must be a terrible shock.”

“It is,” Ari said, his voice tight.

“My sincerest sympathies.”

Baron exhaled and looked back at Alene. “DCI Ardone, you’ve brought me a political bomb built on a single unverified transmission and a file of old committee minutes. As I’m sure you already deduced, Councillor Herbert will claim she is being framed. This motive is only words. How do you propose we counter that? What proves this is not a political smear campaign?”

“We need to secure the how, Justice. The method. How the pathogen was produced or distributed, and to be able to tie it to Councillor Herbert.”

“Indeed.” Baron nodded. “And with someone of her stature, you have to be very careful. If we move on her and you are wrong, public trust shatters. If you are right and move too clumsily, she buries it. Without the how, this is nothing more than a career-ending accusation. If you get something concrete, something that proves method, only then can I act.”

“Understood,” Alene said, and the image of the Justice disappeared.

The room dropped back into silence. The sun had since set behind the towers of Vauxhall, leaving the room in grey dusk save the terminal’s idle glow. Ari let out a breath he had not known he was holding. The last hour, the last few days, all of it settled into his body at once.

“Not at all what I expected,” Ari said. “He seemed very bureaucratic.”

Alene nodded. “I clocked that too. He made me name the gap for him and gave no instructions so he could keep his hands clean if this turns out badly. But he’s not wrong about the evidence. We’re still missing the how.”

Alene rubbed at her chin. Maybe she had already moved past Baron’s manipulation to the next problem, but Ari had not. Any dealing with Baron felt like a betrayal of Santo.

“If Francis did this, how did she produce the pathogen? How did she distribute it? That’s the evidence we need.”

“And then we’ll know if Francis is a monster or the victim,” Ari said. “We’re in a black box, Alene. Components in a system we can’t see.”

“Not entirely,” Alene said. “We need a neutral ally. Someone completely outside this political network. A third party we can trust.”

Ari knew what that meant. Sharon was always the one to trust.

“If this thing was manufactured,” Alene said, “Sharon will know how it could have been distributed. She already has the data and she’ll know where to look.”

Alene was right. Sharon was outside the political mess, pure science. She was also someone who knew Francis as a person, not just as a politician.

“Right. Okay. We’ll ring Sharon.”

“No,” Alene said. “We’ll go see her in the morning.”

Ari just nodded. The thought of facing Sharon sent a fresh wave of static through him. He wanted to see Sharon with a force that made him feel exposed. With Francis, the woman who raised him and the last connection to his real parents, probably a mass murderer, Sharon was the only family he had left. Except she wasn’t anymore.

He looked down at his hands and saw them shaking. He had failed Sharon, but he still needed her. What protocol was there for that?