Page 48

I run my hand down Bentley’s spine, feeling every vertebra, every twitch under his skin. He’s shaking, but not from cold.

I pull him closer. He lets me.

“Your training shows,” he says, voice gone hoarse.

I laugh, or try to. It’s more like a cough. “Surprised?”

He doesn’t answer. Instead, he turns in my arms, stares at me. There’s blood on his mouth, probably mine. His hair is a mess, face streaked red and white and sweat.

For the first time, I see the lines around his eyes. He looks tired.

He says, “You know what I realized tonight?”

I shake my head.

He traces one of the bruises on my ribcage, where the last round of Enforcement drills left a yellow-and-purple smear. “You’re not an asset.”

I swallow, the words harder to process than anything that just happened. “No?”

He shakes his head. “You’re a variable. I can’t model for you. And that’s—” He stops, like the words are physical.

He exhales, a long, shaky breath.

“—terrifying,” he says.

The word hangs in the dark.

He lies back, lets me watch the way his chest rises and falls. I count the breaths, the same way I did in the cell, waiting for the moment the world comes back.

It does.

He stands, unsteady, and walks to the bookcase. Still naked, still marked up, he slides a hand under one of the lower shelves. There’s a hiss, and a false panel opens. He reaches in and pulls out a black metal case.

He brings it to me, kneeling so we’re eye to eye.

“This is what you wanted,” he says. “You want to know what you’re part of?”

I nod. I expect him to hand it over, but he doesn’t.

He opens the case. Inside, there’s a stack of folders, thicker than my arm. The top file is stamped with the House Brooks seal, but the one under it is blue, marked with the Ministry’s code.

He takes out the blue file. “Read this,” he says.

I do. The language is bureaucratic, dry, but the meaning is clear: the Ministry is not just a machine. It’s a hydra, a network of nodes, each with its own agenda. Brooks is just one head of many. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of men like him.

And yet…

None of them have what we do.

I look up, and he’s watching me, his expression unreadable.

He says, “The Silent gave me power. But you gave me something more dangerous.”

I flip through the rest of the file. The names mean nothing to me, but I memorize the faces, the dates, the codenames. It’s a map of the future, and my name is on it.

He closes the file, sets it aside.

“Showing you that treason,” he says.