Whispers of Callan

POV: Malia

​The safehouse beneath the cliffside estate smelled of ozone, copper, and cold stone.

​It was two in the morning. The server room was buried twenty feet underground, illuminated only by the rhythmic, cold blue pulses of the rack-mounted hard drives and the harsh white glare of the terminal monitors.

​I sat in the swivel chair before the main console, my fingers flying across the mechanical keyboard. Beside me, Jarrah stood leaning over my shoulder, one hand braced on the edge of the steel desk, his heavy frame casting a broad shadow over the screens. He had changed into a dark tactical sweater, but he hadn't cleaned the smudge of grease and faint dried blood from his jawline. He was too consumed by what was loading on the screen.

​"Bypassing the third layer of encryption now," I muttered, my eyes scanning lines of yellow code scrolling down the black monitor. "Vance’s keycard got us past the perimeter, but the files in Vault 4 were locked under a dual-key protocol. It’s old police infrastructure."

​"My father built backdoors into the precinct's system twenty years ago," Jarrah said, his voice clipped, unnervingly still. His breath fanned across the side of my neck, sending a betraying shiver down my spine despite the life-and-death stakes. "Try the broadcast frequency from the '08 raid."

​I entered the string: 0412-K-CALABY.

​The terminal beeped twice. A heavy green checkmark flashed, and a single, thick directory folder expanded across the display.

​FILE CODE: REDACTED_CASE_7739-B

SUBJECT: CALLAN JARRAH CALABY (DECEASED)

​My breath hitched in my throat. I glanced up at Jarrah. His jaw was set so hard the muscle quivered. His hand on the desk had tightened until his knuckles were stark white.

​"Open it," he commanded softly.

I clicked the primary P*F. Pages of scanned, yellowed documents appeared. Official police letterhead from fourteen years ago. Most of the text was covered in heavy, impenetrable black bars of thick redaction ink.

​"Look at the timeline," I said, pointing a trembling finger at the monitor. "The official story was that Callan was killed at 02:14 AM during a SWAT breach at the warehouse on the docks. But look at this wire log."

​I highlighted an unredacted fragment halfway down the third page.

​01:45 AM: Officer-in-Charge reports suspect C. Calaby in custody at Precinct 4. No injuries reported.

​Jarrah bent lower, his shoulder brushing mine, his body rigid as iron. "He was in custody? Thirty minutes before the raid?"

​"He wasn't caught in crossfire at the docks, Jarrah," I breathed, reading the tiny, unredacted margins of the arresting officer's notes. "He was taken into a holding cell. And look who signed the transfer order."

​My cursor hovered over a blurred signature at the bottom of the precinct intake sheet. I ran a sharp contrast filter over the image, clearing the pixelation line by line.

​The name slowly resolved: Det. A. Vance. Acting under special directive from Commander Alastair Vance.

​"Alastair didn't kill him in a shootout," I whispered, horror pooling in my stomach. "He had him in a room. Callan wasn't a casualty of war... he was executed."

​Jarrah didn't speak. The silence in the server room became suffocating. I could feel the sheer, destructive grief radiating from him a pressure wave of violent, quiet agony. I reached out, wrapping my hand over his white-knuckled grip on the desk.

​"Jarrah..." I began softly.

​Suddenly, a sharp, high-pitched screech tore through the server room speakers.

​The blue lights on the rack units instantly flipped to a flashing, violent red. A blaring proximity siren began to wail, echoing off the concrete walls.

​WARNING: EXTERNAL TELEMETRY LOCK DETECTED.

WARNING: PERIMETER BREACH  SECTOR 1.

​"Shit!" I yelled, pulling up the estate's external radar feed on the secondary monitor.

​Three fast-moving thermal signatures were sweeping down from the clouds over the ocean, moving at breakneck speed straight toward the estate's coordinates.

​"Drones," Jarrah snapped, his grief instantly replaced by tactical coldness. "Alastair had a ping set on Vault 4’s decryption key. The second we opened the file, it signaled his strike team."

"I need two minutes to d******d the raw data to a flash drive!" I shouted over the wailing alarm, slapping an encrypted thumb drive into the console port. "If we leave now, the servers will wipe automatically!"

​"We don't have two minutes!" Jarrah grabbed my shoulder, trying to haul me out of the chair.

​"One minute, Jarrah! Just give me one minute! This is the proof we need to tear Alastair's network apart!" I locked my eyes onto his, refusing to move. "I am not losing Callan's truth again!"

​Jarrah looked at me, a flash of desperate, raw emotion breaking through his dark eyes. He swore under his breath, drawing his primary heavy firearm with his right hand while using his left to brace himself over my chair, shielding my upper body with his own as the progress bar on the screen ticked up: 45%... 50%...

​Above us, a high-pitched, terrifying mechanical whine cut through the concrete ceiling.

​"Inbound!" Jarrah roared.

​He didn't try to run for the door. He knew it was too late.

​Instead, Jarrah grabbed me by the waist, violently pulling me out of the chair and hauling me down beneath the reinforced steel lip of the central server desk. He wrapped his arms entirely around me, throwing his heavy frame over my back, burying my head into his chest and pinning me against the floor.

​BOOM!

​The world shattered into blind white light and deafening thunder.

​The shockwave hit the underground bunker like a sledgehammer. The ceiling violently caved in. Massive blocks of reinforced concrete, steel beams, and screaming server racks came raining down in a blizzard of fire, sparks, and pulverized dust.

​A heavy steel support joist snapped directly overhead, collapsing straight down toward our position.

​Jarrah arched his back, bracing his boots against the floor, taking the entire direct weight of the falling structural debris on his shoulder blades and back to keep it from crushing me.

​I heard the agonizing, sickening crunch of impact. Jarrah let out a low, gut-wrenching groan, a sound of pure physical agony that tore right through my soul. His grip around my ribs tightened to a vise, his body shielding every inch of mine as hot concrete dust and burning metal rained down around us.

​"Jarrah!" I screamed into his chest, my hands clawing at his tactical sweater, feeling the violent shudder that ran through his muscles.

​The sound of explosions faded into a ringing silence, replaced by the crackle of electrical fires and the hiss of ruptured coolant lines. Dust filled the air, thick and gray, making me cough violently.

​"Jarrah... Jarrah, look at me!" I cried out, trying to shift beneath him.

​Slowly, the heavy weight resting on top of me shifted slightly. Jarrah didn't move off me; he couldn't. His body was pinned beneath a massive section of collapsed ceiling beam, but he had held it off my frame.

​He coughed, a wet, dark splatter hitting the dusty concrete near my head.

​"Are... are you hit?" he choked out, his voice a thready, broken rasp. His dark eyes fluttered open, searching my face with frantic, unyielding concern even as his own face was deathly pale.

​"No! I'm fine! You took all of it, you idiot!" Tears cut hot tracks through the dust on my cheeks as I squeezed my hand behind his back, feeling the sticky, thick heat of blood soaking through his clothes. "Jarrah, you're bleeding!"

​"I'm fine," he lied, his breath coming in shallow, agonizing gasps. "The drive... did you..."

​I turned my head slightly into the ruin of the room.

The console desk was smashed in half. But hanging by a single wire, the shattered main monitor flickered weakly in the smoke. The d******d progress bar was frozen at 100% Complete.

​And right beneath it, on the unredacted police log file that had automatically opened upon completion, a final, unredacted line of text flashed in stark red across the cracked glass before the monitor died completely:

​INFORMANT ON SITE AT TIME OF CALLAN CALABY'S ARREST: DECEASED OFFICER MARCUS VANE (FATHER OF MALIA VANE).

​My blood ran instantly cold. My breathing stopped.

​My father.

​My father was the one who handed Callan over to Alastair.

​I stared at the black screen in utter, soul-crushing shock, my mind reeling into a dark abyss. Everything I believed, everything I was fighting for, was built on a lie. My family was the reason Jarrah's brother was dead.

​"Malia..." Jarrah’s voice was fading, his head dropping heavily onto my shoulder, his skin burning hot and slick with sweat as he slipped toward unconsciousness from the blood loss and the weight crushing him. "What... what did it say?"

​Before I could form a word, the high-pitched, ominous whine of a second set of drone engines began to reverberate through the smoking crater above us.

​And from the darkness of the ruined doorway, the heavy, deliberate crunch of tactical boots approached through the rubble.