Unbroken Lines

Jarrah's POV

I told her the truth in the lift because it was the only place in that building I trusted.

"It's a lie," I said. "Whatever he wants you to think, it's a lie."

"Is it?"

She didn't say it cruelly. That was worse. Malia stood with her back against the mirrored wall, the phone held against her chest like something she'd been handed at a funeral, and watched me the way she'd watched Thorne. Looking for the seam.

"There's something I haven't told you," I said. "It's not what Alastair's making it sound like. But it's there."

The floor numbers dropped. Thirty-two. Thirty. Twenty-nine.

"Tell me tonight," she said. "Not here. I can't hear it with the doors about to open."

I wanted to argue. I'd spent three weeks arranging the words, and not one of them would have survived a lift. So I nodded, and she gave me a look I couldn't read, and we walked out into the lobby side by side, not touching.

I hated that more than the phone.

My operations room used to be a storage level. Now it had eleven screens, four analysts, and a smell of burnt coffee that had settled into the carpet. The police driver sat on the central desk in a clear case, a grey brick no bigger than a cigarette packet. Three layers of its encryption were open. The fourth sat there like a shut door.

"Update," I said.

Doran, my lead, didn't look up. He had the look of a man on his second night without sleep. "Same wall as yesterday. It's not a password. It's a structure, and the structure is stitched to the hardware token you've got. Without the token's paired machine, we're guessing at a lock that rewrites itself every time we guess wrong."

"How many wrong guesses are left?"

"We don't know." He finally looked at me. "That's the problem, boss. We don't know."

I put both hands on the desk. Every resource I owned, the board, the accounts, the quiet men in the ports who did not appear on any list, had been aimed at Thorne for the last month. Now Thorne was in a holding room two floors down and the syndicate's ranks, for the first time since my father died, were clean. Every man who answered me answered because he chose to.

So I pointed all of it at that grey brick.

"Pull the port teams in," I said. "Cancel leave. Whoever has a decryption background, I want them here by noon. Offer double. If someone's cousin knows someone, bring the cousin."

"Boss, throwing people at it won't..."

"Then we'll throw them until they break." My voice came out harder than I meant. "Callan died for what's inside that drive, Doran. I'm not letting it rot because I was too careful."

The room went still. Nobody said Callan's name in front of me. They all knew why.

I sensed Malia in the doorway before I saw her. She'd changed her coat. She had her father's way of standing, upright and unhurried, but nothing else of him, and I had spent months learning the difference.

"Eat something," she said, and put a paper bag on the desk. "You haven't since yesterday."

"How do you know that?"

"Because I haven't either, and I've been watching you not eat."

It was nearly a joke. I took the bag. It was the closest we'd come to normal since the boardroom, and I held on to it.

The power went out at 6:14 that evening.

I was in the middle of a sentence. The screens died, all eleven of them, and the hum I'd stopped noticing years ago cut out so completely the silence rang. Someone swore. Someone's chair hit the floor.

"Generator," I said. "Doran."

"Already waiting, boss." A pause. "Nothing's kicking in."

Emergency lights should have come up. They didn't. The window behind the desk showed the city beyond, and the city had gone out in a long, dark wave from the river to the Calaby hub, block by block, as if a hand were passing over it.

My phone lit with Marcus. "It's not just us," he said. "Substations on Fenner Road, the exchange, two of the feeder lines. Someone took the grid down. On purpose."

Alastair. I knew it the way you know a smell. He didn't send bullets when he was angry. He sent silence, and he waited to see what you'd do in it.

"Get everyone to the lower level," I said. "Manual locks. Nobody walks alone."

"And the drive?"

"With me."

I took the case off the desk. In the dark, a hand touched my sleeve, quick and sure.

"I'm here," Malia said.

I hadn't realised I'd been listening for her. "Stay close."

"I'm not going anywhere."

By eight, the building had been secured, the analysts sent down, the doors chained. By nine, the city outside was still black, and I'd given up pretending there was anything left to do but wait. I'd lit candles from a box in the break room, stubby white things from some forgotten birthday, and set them along the ledge of the old reception floor, where the glass walls looked over a dead skyline.

Malia sat on the floor with her back to a pillar and her knees drawn up. The candlelight did nothing for her face, and I couldn't stop looking at it anyway.

"You said tonight," she said.

I sat opposite her. Not close enough to touch. I'd earned that distance.

"When we got the first layer of the police drive open, there was an index," I said. "A list of what's in the file. Case numbers. Names. I read it before I showed it to anyone." I made myself keep going. "Your mother's name was on it."

Her face didn't move. But I saw her hands tighten around her knees.

"I didn't know what it meant. I still don't. It could be nothing. It could be a record of her statement at the time she disappeared; it could be..." I stopped. "I should've told you the same hour. I told myself I was protecting you until I understood. That's what everyone tells themselves, isn't it? I was really protecting myself. I was scared of the look you're giving me right now."

"What look?"

"The one where you decide whether I'm like him."

She was quiet for a long time. A candle guttered and recovered. Somewhere far below us, a generator that wasn't ours coughed once and died.

"I've been waiting my whole life for someone to say my mother's name to me as it mattered," Malia said at last. Her voice shook, and she didn't try to stop it. "My father never would. He'd go very still, like she'd been a stain he scrubbed out. And you had it. You had it for three weeks."

"I know."

"I'm so angry at you."

"You should be."

"I'm angry, and I'm..." She laughed once, helplessly, and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. "I still came and sat in this dark room with you. What does that say about me?"

"That you're braver than I am."

She shook her head, but I was already moving, shifting across the cold floor until I knelt in front of her. I didn't touch her. I waited.

"Listen to me," I said. "I've lied by leaving things out my whole life. My father did it. Thorne did it. It's the family language, and I swore I'd never speak it to you. I just did, and I'm sorry. Whatever's in that drive, whatever's next, you'll hear it from me first. Before the board. Before Doran. Before I've even decided what it means. No secret, Malia. Not one. I'd rather lose the whole port than lose you over something I could have said out loud."

I meant every word, and I could hear how big it sounded in the dark. I waited for her to flinch from it.

She reached out instead and laid her palm flat against my chest, over the place where my heart was making a mess of things.

"Say it again when it costs you something," she said.

"I will."

"I'm going to hold you to that."

"Good."

She leaned in. Her forehead came to rest against mine, and I closed my eyes, and for one slow breath the city could burn, and I would not have noticed. Her hand shifted in my shirt and held on. We stayed like that until the candle by her shoulder burned low.

The sound broke it.

A soft electronic chirp came from the case at my feet. I'd forgotten it was there. Malia felt me go rigid and drew back, and we both looked down.

The hardware token lay inside the case, wrapped in a cloth I'd put there myself. Its tiny indicator had been dead for two weeks, ever since Doran's team tried to force it. Now it glowed a clean, steady green.

"That isn't possible," I said. "It has no power source."

"Jarrah." Malia's voice was thin. "Look at the drive."

The grey brick beside it was showing a single line of white text on its little recovery screen. Nothing else had lit—just that, and a string of coordinates under it.

Level 3. Core. Come alone.

I knew where those numbers pointed. I'd been in that place once, as a boy, holding my father's hand.

The vault under the old city. The one nobody had opened in twenty years.