All Chapters of THE LUNA HE BURIED: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The boundary gate came up on my left and I didn't turn my head to look at it.I felt it though. The way you feel a place you used to know - not in your mind exactly, more in the back of your throat, this low recognition that your body holds onto even when your brain has done everything right to let go. Five years. And still my shoulders pulled in slightly as we passed through, like they were trying to make me smaller than I was.Marcus was driving. He did most things the way he did this - steady, unhurried, aware of everything and showing you almost none of it. We'd made the two hours with maybe fifteen minutes of total conversation, which was fine. I'd used the time to go through the case files again and to make sure my face had finished deciding what it was going to do.It had decided on nothing useful, so I'd settled for neutral.Professional. Competent. Dr. Venn, Voss Medical Division, cross-territory consultation, here to do a job. That was all this was. That was all I was going

I drove back in two hours and nine minutes.I know because I checked the time when I passed through the Graves boundary and I checked it again when I pulled into the Voss facility's east lot, and the math was something I didn't let myself think too hard about because thinking about it meant thinking about why I'd been driving like that, and I wasn't ready to do that yet.The supply review justification had taken me four minutes to write up and route through the administrative system the night before. It was legitimate enough - two pending inventory sign-offs that genuinely needed my physical signature. I'd just moved them to the front of the queue in a way I wouldn't normally move them, at a time I wouldn't normally choose, for a reason I wasn't putting in writing anywhere.Marcus had seen my departure request. Of course he had. I'd sent a message through official channels, kept the language clean, confirmed I'd be back in Graves territory within twenty-four hours. His reply had been

I drove faster than I should have and slower than I wanted to.The road stretched out ahead of me - two hours of dark highway and white lane markers disappearing under the car in a rhythm that should have been calming and wasn't. I had the heat on too high, and I hadn't noticed until my hands started feeling strange on the wheel. I turned it down. Small adjustments. That was what this drive was - small adjustments to things I could control while the thing I couldn't control sat in my chest like a stone.Marcus found something.Three words. That was all Damien had said before I told him I would leave within the hour. I had not needed more than three words. I had known - the way you know things you have been dreading long enough that they stop being fears and start being scheduled - exactly what Marcus had found.The drawing.Eli's drawing. Two figures in blue crayon on paper from his art pad, the kind he carried everywhere in his school bag. A tall one and a small one. And on the back,

The briefing room was three doors down from where I had been standing in the corridor holding Eli's drawing. I followed them because Marcus looked at me over his shoulder when he said Cora's presence would be useful, and useful was something I could be even when everything else was in pieces.I set the drawing face down on the table when I sat. I didn't examine why.Marcus had a folder. He always had a folder — physical documentation in addition to digital, because Marcus did not trust systems he hadn't built himself, and most systems fell into that category. He opened it on the table and began.The contractor's name was first. An entity registered eighteen months ago in a border territory with minimal governance oversight, structured specifically to obscure the chain of authorization. Marcus had traced it through four shell registrations to a primary operator whose name meant nothing to me but whose financial history meant everything to the investigation."The materials used to const

"Fine," I said.He had not been expecting that. I could tell by the way he recalibrated — not dramatically, just the small internal adjustment of a person who had prepared for a longer fight and found the door open instead.We were still in the corridor. The chair he had been sitting in was behind him, slightly askew from the wall where he had pulled it. The overnight lighting was doing its low warm thing around us. It was past midnight, and I had just come out of my son's room, and I was out of arguments that felt worth having."My terms," I said."Tell me your terms."I had run them on the floor of Eli's room while I was listening to him sleep. I had not been planning to accept. And then I had sat there long enough to understand that refusing the secured arrangement on principle while a network with a documented threat assessment had my name was not principled. It was stubborn. And stubborn was something I could afford when the only person at risk was me.Eli changed the calculus. H