Chapter 6

The backup agents had already slipped through the open door when they reached us. Two of them took Miguel gently by the arms and lifted him toward the corridor. I rose to my feet and met his eyes; for a heartbeat the lab fell away and it was just the two of us. I gave him a small, steadying nod and an assuring smile.

Miguel returned the smile, then surprised me by wriggling free of the agent’s grip and running into my arms. He hugged my waist with the fierce, unselfconscious relief of a child who had been lost and then found. I kept my face composed, though my chest tightened. I ruffled his hair with a fingertip; he looked up at me, earnest and exhausted. “Thank you,” he said, voice thin but sincere, before letting go and falling back into the agent’s hand.

Agent Quatro entered then, his grin broad and unapologetic. “That was a good job for us!” he crowed. I rolled my eyes. “Where are Agents Dos and Singko?” I asked.

They came in together, uniforms streaked with grime and blood, faces set like stone. My forehead creased. “Where the hell have you two been?” I demanded.

Quatro laughed, a sharp sound that bounced off the concrete. Dos, never one for pleasantries, swung a katana in a lazy arc that caught the light. “Fuck you, Quatro,” she said, but there was no real heat in it—only the exhausted edge who had been pushed to the limit.

Dos dropped her blade and met my gaze. “We were ambushed,” she said. “A hundred men in the back alley. Our earpieces were fried. This—” she jerked a thumb toward Quatro, “—didn’t answer our calls. Singko and I had to improvise.”

Singko stepped forward, wiping her hands on her trousers. She spoke quietly, “We found the other kids. They were locked in a cell—dozens of them. We got them out. They’re safe now.”

Relief washed through me so suddenly I had to steady myself against the wall. The corridor seemed to exhale with us.

Quatro’s grin softened when he saw the look on my face. “We did what we had to,” he said.

Dos shrugged, the motion almost casual. “We fought our way through. Lost a lot of gear, but we didn’t lose anyone who mattered.” Singko’s jaw worked for a moment, then she allowed herself a brief, tired smile. “They’re alive,” she said simply. “That’s what counts.”

I looked at each of them in turn—at the cuts and bruises, at the dirt that would take days to scrub out, at the way they moved as if every step had been measured against a thousand possible outcomes.

 “Good work,” I said. The words felt small and brittle in my mouth, but they landed where they needed to. “But our mission is not yet done.”

We walked out into the cold and climbed into the car without another word. The engine was a steady heartbeat as we drove back to headquarters, the city sliding past in a blur of sodium light and rain-slick glass. In the backseat, Dos thumbed at the bandage on her hand. Quatro stared out the window, jaw clenched. Singko hummed under her breath.

The basement smelled like bleach and old paper when we opened the door. Fluorescent bulbs buzzed overhead, throwing everything into a clinical, unforgiving clarity. The room we used for the worst parts of our work had a name that made people flinch…the torture room. I had never liked the name, but I had learned to accept the necessity of words that made you uncomfortable.

There she was—the doctor from earlier—sitting in the center of the room, hands cuffed to the chair. Her lab coat was stained, her hair loose and limp. She looked smaller in the harsh light, like a specimen under a lens. When she saw us, something like recognition flickered across her face, then hardened into a practiced calm.

“Welcome to our torture room, Doc,” I said, and let the nonchalance hang in the air like a threat.

She smiled, slow and brittle. “You’re wasting your time, Agent Uno.”

I stepped closer. The room tightened around me; the hum of the lights became a drumbeat in my ears. “Why are you selling the organs of children?” I asked. My voice was steady because I had to make it steady. Steady was a tool. Steady kept the edges from fraying.

The doctor’s eyes flicked to Dos, Quatro, Singko—then back to me. “You think I’m the villain in this story?” she asked. “You think I enjoy it?”

Dos leaned in, voice low and dangerous. “Then tell us why. Tell us who’s buying them.”

The doctor’s laugh was a dry thing. “You want a name? You want a ledger? I can give you numbers, but numbers don’t explain the why. We sell because there is a need. We sell because there is a cause that is bigger than any one conscience.”

“Bigger than children?” Quatro’s voice was a blade. “Bigger than the kids you cut open?”

She shrugged, as if shrugging could make the moral calculus lighter. “You think the world is simple, Agent Quatro. It isn’t. There are projects—research, treatments, experiments—that require resources. Organs are currency. They fund things that will save more lives than they take.”

Singko’s hand tightened on the edge of the table. “That’s monstrous.”

“Monstrous,” the doctor echoed, and there was no shame in it. Only a clinical detachment that made my skin crawl. “But necessary.”

I reached into my jacket and pulled out the photograph I had kept folded in my pocket since the raid. The paper was creased, the edges soft from being handled. I set it on the table between us and slid it toward her.

She glanced at it, then looked up. The tattoo in the photo was unmistakable: a small, intricate symbol inked behind the ear of a boy who had been one of the last cases my grandfather had been investigating. The same symbol had been on the arm of a man we’d found in a warehouse.

“Why do your men have the same tattoo as the last case my grandfather was investigating?” I asked. My voice narrowed until it was a wire.

The doctor’s face changed then. For a moment, the practiced calm cracked and something like amusement—no, malice—slid in. “Your grandfather,” she said softly, as if tasting the word. “He was a good man. He asked questions he shouldn’t have. He poked at things that were better left buried.”

Heat rose in my chest. My grandfather’s face, the last time I’d seen him alive—pale, stubborn, refusing to let the case go—flashed behind my eyes. He had been an agent before me, a man who taught me how to read a room, how to read a lie. He had been the one who had started this thread, and then, when the thread pulled tight, he had been cut loose.

“You mock him,” I said. “You mock me.”

The doctor’s smile widened. “I don’t mock him, Agent Uno. I mock you. You were supposed to be the one to finish what he started. You were supposed to follow the trail. Instead, you left. You walked away. Because of you, he died.”

The words landed like a blow. For a second the room tilted. I could feel every agent’s breath held, waiting for me to break.

“You think I left?” I spoke. My voice was small, but it carried. “You think I abandoned him?”

She shrugged again, as if shrugging could absolve her of everything. “You left your post. You chose a life that wasn’t this. He kept digging alone. He paid the price.”

Anger rose in me, hot and precise. It wasn’t just anger at the doctor; it was a raw, aching grief that had been folded into me for years. I had left—yes—but not because I wanted to. I had left because I had been forced to, because the agency had told me to step back, because the world had a way of deciding who could carry a burden and who had to drop it. My grandfather had kept going when I couldn’t. He had paid with his life.

“You don’t get to make my choices into your justification,” I said. “You don’t get to turn his death into a lesson for me.”

The doctor’s eyes were cold. “I don’t need your permission to justify what I do. I only need results.” Dos moved then, a shadow at my shoulder. “We’re going to make you talk,” she said. “We’re going to make you tell us who’s buying those organs and why.”

The doctor’s laugh was soft. “Make me? You think you can make me? You think you can break me?”

Quatro’s hand found the strap at his hip. Singko’s fingers flexed. The room hummed with the promise of violence, and for a moment I felt the old, familiar pull—the part of me that had been trained to use force when words failed. But I also felt something else: the memory of my grandfather’s hands, the way he had held a pen like it was a weapon, the way he had believed in evidence more than in spectacle.

I leaned in close enough to see the doctor’s pupils dilate. “You will tell us everything,” I said. “Names. Buyers. Routes. Or we will make sure you never speak again.”

She met my gaze without flinching. “You can silence me,” she said. “You can break me. But the network is bigger than one doctor. You’ll cut off one head and another will grow. You’ll never stop it.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But we’ll stop you.”

She smiled then, a small, satisfied thing. “You’re sentimental, Agent Uno. You think stopping me will bring your grandfather back. It won’t. It will only make you feel better for a little while.”

The words were a knife. I wanted to answer with something sharp, something that would make her feel the weight of what she’d said. Instead, I reached for the one thing that had always steadied me... my knife.  “Start talking,” I said. “Now.”

She hesitated, and in that pause, I saw the calculation behind her eyes. Maybe she was weighing the cost of silence against the cost of confession. Maybe she was buying time. Maybe she was simply tired.

“Fine,” she said at last. “I’ll tell you what I know. But understand this, Agent Uno—what you learn here will not be clean. It will not be neat. It will be ugly, and it will ask things of you that you may not be willing to give.”