Page 12 of Thorne
I let go.
Step back.
Get my hand on her arm—the grip, the professional grip, the grip that is purely about moving an asset from point A to point B—and march her toward the command tent.
She doesn't say anything about it.
I don't say anything about it.
She walks where I put her. Out of the perimeter tent, across forty feet of hardpack, into the command tent. The team is already there. She looks at Ghost, not at me.
"Tell me why we shouldn't work the lists without you." Ghost's gray eyes are flat, devoid of warmth.
She doesn't flinch from it.
"You can't." Not defiance. Just the math. "The architecture is in my head. The filing codes Stratton Financial used: trial cohort designations, institutional access protocols, and the encryption keys for the regional coordinator networks have all been erased. Halo can brute-force it. It will take weeks, if not months, for him to crack the system." Her eyes go to Halo. Not to me. "The patient architecture is more than the lists. The distribution infrastructure, the institutional access protocols, the financial layering Stratton Financial used to move the money—all of it is designed to be invisible. I designed it that way." A pause. "If you're going to find every patient, every institution, everycoordinator who touched this, you need me to walk you through it. There's no other way in."
Her gaze moves to Ghost, then Halo.
Not to me.
"If the Ghostwater servers go down, the fragments scatter. Phoenix reconstitutes somewhere you'll never find. The cage has to stay intact—you have to let it pull the fragments home." She pauses. "I know what that sounds like. I know you'll need to sit with it."
Nobody speaks.
Her hands are flat on the table.
Still.
I hate those hands.
The hands that wrote the ASHFALL protocol. The hands that designed the financial architecture Phoenix runs on. The same hands that moved money from column A to column B without ever stopping to ask what was being pushed into the veins of children trying not to die of cancer.
My eyes stay on her hands longer than they should.
Long fingers. Precise. Controlled.
Hands built for systems. For structure.
For restraint.
Something tight and violent coils in my chest.
Total. Pressurized. No exit.
My jaw shifts as I grind my teeth, deliberately loosening the tension before I crack.
Because those hands …
Those hands belong to the woman who helped build the machine that poisoned my daughter.
And those same hands are currently the only map we have to dismantle it.
The two facts sit in my head like opposing charges.
They don't cancel each other out.
They don't merge.
