Page 260 of Operation: Defiance

Chapter Seventy-Eight

Raine

I pour the last of the French press into my mug. Ellen’s folder is done. Inara sent the audio file from the hospital while I was sleeping. Hearing Ellen describe her corrections, her pain, her fear…it was too hard. I only made it through fifteen minutes of the hour-long recording. Enough to confirm her account was coherent. Believable. And that the past three days hadn’t broken her completely.

I close her folder and start building mine.

Logs. Vitals checks. So many videos. I don’t watch any of them. Working on my affidavit will be hard enough. I don’t need to see what they did to me in high definition.

At the bottom of the search results, there’s a single document that’s out of place. Not a log or a video.

I slide Asher’s challenge coin into my palm, then open it. It takes me a moment to fully comprehend what I’m looking at.

Paperwork. My paperwork.

Detainee ID: 3F-207

Status: Compliance failure

Disposal: Scheduled

If medical complication does not occur within the standard post-calibration window, approval is granted for manual disposal.

—Julian Voss

Post-calibration window. Manual disposal.

My pulse hammers hard enough, I might want to throw up. The screen blurs at the edges. I blink, and read the memo again.

Voss ordered my death with a single sentence of bureaucratic nonsense. And he’s the one with Asher’s fate in his hands. Who’s deciding—maybe at this very moment—how long Asher survives.

I sit with that for exactly as long as I can afford to. Then I copy the file, label it, and move it into a separate folder. My final play. The one I don’t make until everything else is already on the table.

It’s labeled with a single word.

Voss.

I pick up my mug, curling my fingers around the porcelain. The coffee’s gone lukewarm. I drink it anyway, then go poking around the flash drive to see if my disposal order was stored with any others.

It was.

When I open the folder, shock drains all the heat from my limbs. There are almost a hundred files here.

I work through them one at a time. So many names I recognize from the past few days. A few I don’t. The oldest disposal order is from only a month after Voss officially created Coherent Path.

Checking off each name one at a time in my notebook, I continue to click file after file.

Until a video pops up on the screen.

“What are you doing? This…no. This isn’t right!”

Four men muscle a woman into a room with a narrow, stainless steel table in the center. She fights them, but her wrists and ankles are locked in thick restraints. It takes less than thirty seconds to strap her down. A man in a white lab coat takes a handful of her thick black hair and pulls it away from her face.

Oh, God.

Marisol.

I once watched her stare down a room full of hostiles in Bucharest like they were unruly toddlers who needed a nap. Like danger was something that happened to other people.