Chapter 77

POV: Liam

The Atlantic didn’t care about corporate hierarchies. It didn't care about the fall of the Sterling name or the death of a digital goddess. Out here, three hundred miles from the nearest coastline, the world was a vast, churning slate of charcoal grey and white foam.

I stood on the narrow deck of the Seraphina, a mid-sized freighter that smelled of diesel and salt. The wind was a physical force, a cold hand pressing against my chest, threatening to push me back into the steel railing. I looked down at my hands. The bandages were gone, replaced by thin, pink scars that stung in the salt spray. They were the only physical proof I had left of the night at the medical wing.

"You should be inside," a voice said over the roar of the engines.

I turned to see Isabella—Sarah—standing in the doorway of the bridge. She was wearing a heavy, oversized wool sweater Marcus had found in a thrift shop in Brooklyn. Her hair was pulled back, her face pale but clear. The waxy, translucent look was gone. She looked solid. She looked alive.

"I needed the air," I said. "The cabin feels like a vault."

"It's the silence," she said, stepping out to join me. She didn't flinch at the cold. She leaned against the railing, her shoulder brushing mine. "You’re still waiting for the ping. You’re waiting for the world to tell you what the stock price is."

"I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop," I admitted. "Eleanor is in a state-run psychiatric ward under twenty-four-hour guard. Halloway is turning state’s evidence. The board is a memory. But it feels too clean, Isabella. My father didn't build lifeboats that only had one seat."

"You mean the trust," she said.

I pulled the small, encrypted tablet Marcus had handed me before he disappeared into the New Jersey fog. It was a rugged, military-grade device, disconnected from any network. I had been staring at the ledger for three days, watching the numbers shift in a way that defied the logic of a frozen account.

"The Zurich trust isn't just sitting there," I said, showing her the screen. "Look at the secondary activity. Small, untraceable withdrawals. Fractional amounts, but they’re being used to pay for server maintenance in a facility in Reykjavik."

Isabella’s brow furrowed. She looked at the string of numbers, her mind—the human one, the one that used to be a processor—calculating the patterns. "Iceland? Why would the trust be paying for servers if the Medusa project is dead?"

"Because the project wasn't just the shunt," I said. "The shunt was the receiver. The project was the broadcast. The cloud. My father and Julian didn't just want to save your memories; they wanted to create a persistent state. A digital afterlife."

"Liam, the archive was wiped," she said, her hand going instinctively to the back of her neck. "I felt it. The purge was total."

"The local archive was wiped," I corrected. "But the 'Sterling Bridge' file... the one you sent to the employees... it had a parasitic header. I didn't see it until I looked at the raw code this morning. When you hit send, you didn't just send a video. You sent a seed."

Isabella stepped back, her eyes widening. The spray of a wave hit the deck, but she didn't seem to notice. "A seed for what?"

"A distributed network," I said. "One hundred thousand computers now have a fragment of the Vane-Sterling architecture hidden in their background processes. It’s a ghost cloud, Isabella. It’s unkillable because it doesn't have a center. And someone is managing it."

"Who?"

"That’s what I’m trying to find out," I said.

I scrolled to the bottom of the ledger. There was a single name listed as the "Technical Executor." It wasn't a Vane. It wasn't a Sterling.

It was a name I hadn't seen in years. A man who had been my father’s first apprentice, the one who had disappeared shortly after the 2014 pension move.

Subject: Arthur Vance.

"Vance?" Isabella asked. "The Director's son?"

"The one who was supposed to have died in a car accident in 2015," I said. "The one whose 'death' was the reason my father was able to blackmail Director Vance into supporting the merger. If Arthur is alive, and if he’s the one managing the ghost cloud..."

"Then the merger wasn't the endgame," Isabella finished. "It was the distraction. The real work was always intended to move off-grid. Away from the boards, away from the families, away from the laws."

I looked out at the horizon. The sun was a pale, weak disc struggling to break through the clouds. We were heading for a man who didn't exist, to reclaim a fortune that was currently funding a digital ghost.

"He’s the second signatory," I said. "He’s the one who can unlock the medical files you need for the permanent bypass in Zurich. He’s not an enemy, Isabella. He’s the guardian."

"Or he’s the jailer," she said.

We stood there in the cold, the weight of the new truth settling over us. We had escaped the tower, but the architecture of our lives was still standing, invisible and vast, stretching across the globe.

"Why didn't you tell me this before we left?" she asked.

"Because I wanted you to have three days of being Sarah," I said. "I wanted you to know what it felt like to just be a girl on a boat, without a deadline."

"I knew," she said, taking my hand. Her fingers were cold, but her grip was sure. "I knew the moment I saw you looking at that tablet. You have a 'CEO face,' Liam. You think you’re hiding it, but you look like you’re trying to calculate the weight of the ocean."

"Is it that obvious?"

"To me? Yes." She leaned her head against my arm. "I'm not afraid of Arthur Vance. I'm not even afraid of the ghost cloud. As long as the silence stays in here," she tapped her chest, "I can handle the noise out there."

I pulled her closer, the heavy wool of her sweater scratching against my jacket. We were a long way from the marble and the velvet. We were a long way from the world where we mattered.

"When we get to Reykjavik," I said, "we don't go to the embassy. We don't go to the banks. We go to the coordinates. We finish the job."

"And then?"

"And then we disappear for real," I said. "No Rossi passports. No Marcus. Just us."

The cliffhanger came from the ship’s radio. A sharp, rhythmic crackle of static echoed from the bridge, followed by a voice that shouldn't have been able to reach us on a private frequency.

"Seraphina, this is Reykjavik Control," the voice said. It was calm, precise, and hauntingly familiar. "We have your manifest. We’ve been expecting the Rossi party. Please prepare for a remote handshake. The 'Bridge' is waiting."

Isabella and I locked eyes. The voice wasn't Arthur Vance. It was the same voice from the video file—the one Isabella had sent to the world.

It was Julian Vane.

"My father is dead," Isabella whispered, her face going deathly pale. "I saw the body. I saw the grave."

"The body died," I said, looking at the tablet as the fractional withdrawals suddenly spiked to a total transfer. "But the signal... the signal just went live."

The ghost cloud wasn't a storage unit. It was a resurrection. And we were sailing straight into the heart of it.