One by one, the Thorns returned. Spencer and Leslie first, soaked to the bone. Then Marco and Dwayne, muttering curses about nearly losing their tail in Whitechapel. Sonya and Felix, quiet as ever, with eyes sharp from what they'd seen. Finally Steve and Cobbs, dragging in late but alive.
Virginia and I shared what we'd found in the tunnels: the shard of hard-light glass, the Talon relay, the operative's voice ordering pressure on me, and the name we'd overheard whispered during his meeting.
"His name's Ewan Rourke," I told them, the syllables sharp in my mouth. "That's our man."
Spencer slammed his fist against the table. "I knew it. All our suspects loop back to him. The customs officer, the contractor, the profiteer, they're all his people."
Virginia nodded. "Every trail ends at his doorstep. He's the hub. The others are just feeders."
We pulled our notes together, drawing lines between names, places, and times until the board in front of us bloomed into a spiderweb. At the center sat Rourke who was wealthy enough to blend, ruthless enough to profit, careful enough to keep his hands clean.
We didn't sleep that week.
After Rourke surfaced in our web, the enclave turned into an evidence mill. Where once the space had been a place to fold laundry and taste stale coffee, it became a lab and courtroom and map room at once. Lamps burned all night above the table where our findings lay: manifests, smudged photographs, intercepted messages, the hard-light shard wrapped in a strip of canvas like something too dangerous to look at for long.
Spencer and Leslie became our forensics pair. They cleared a corner into which they ferried gear scavenged from hospital wards and old Overwatch surplus: a scanner with a cracked screen, a battered spectrum analyzer, and a soldering iron with a temper. Spencer coaxed signals out of the shard, his fingers moving like a surgeon's as he coaxed the relay's ghost into showing itself.
"It's not Overwatch hardware," he said on the third morning, eyes rimmed with fatigue. "It's a hybrid. They splice commercial hard-light cores with military-grade comm relays. Whoever built it wanted it to look like nothing, not even Talon, until you knew to look. The signature is… deliberate." He tapped the scope. "They use a low-frequency pulse between bursts. It hides in city noise. That's why it's been invisible."
Leslie folded her arms. "Which means Rourke has someone on the inside who knows how to keep it quiet. Dockyards. Customs. People who can misfile a crate and make a corpse of a man."
On another wall, Marco and Dwayne pinned a timeline together with thumbtacks and thread. Every missing person, every "killed in action," every convoy that never reached its destination formed lines that braided back to specific docks, warehouses, and a handful of small, legal-looking companies bearing Rourke's mark. They traced trucks, port entries, times that shifted like smoke.
"We found shell companies," Marco said, voice flat as cardboard. "Three in the Caymans, two registered in, get this, companies that claim to rebuild enclaves after the war. 'Reconstruction Holdings,' 'New Dawn Logistics.' Rourke's fingerprints are on all of them, but he's not in the ledgers. He uses proxies and launderers. Payments come in under humanitarian expense codes disguised as funeral costs, transport, emergency relief."
Felix, who handled human intel, sat opposite a row of chairs where survivors came, one by one. We offered coffee and blankets and asked very small questions first: What did you remember? Who else was there? What did they look like? Names in the black market ripple like cattails; changeable, slippery, but faces stick. Faces with scars, with the permanent crease of hunger. A woman who claimed she'd been "taken" from a convoy by men in plain transport, turned loose weeks later by a buyer who thought she was no use; a soldier who'd been recorded dead on the official roll but swore he'd paid a price and given a number to call that matched a warehouse on the edge of the Thames.
We triangulated those testimonies with the manifests Marco pulled and found the dead men who weren't dead. Wristbands assigned to bodies that never left the supply train. Medical supply orders that inexplicably listed "other" as the recipient. We stitched those numbers into a list and began to build identities around absence.
Shawn sat with the list like a priest with a prayer book he couldn't read. Virginia took interviews with a quiet thoroughness; her steady questions drew stories out of people who had learned to stop speaking because speaking cost blood. She found a man named Pierre, scar along his jaw, who had been "sold" twice before someone paid a ransom and moved him inland. He trembled as he traced the number stolen from his identification band. "They used my name on the report," he said. "Said I was gone. My wife, she slept and never woke. They told her he was dead." He pressed his hands to his face and the room smelled of rain and old tobacco.
We hacked. We didn't break into servers and shout; we nudged at backdoors, followed byte-long trails through maintenance logs and access timestamps. Steve and Cobbs learned to read ledger code like scripture. They found a pattern: a string of microtransactions tunneled through cryptocurrency channels and cashed out in small amounts to local enforcers. The payouts matched entries in the funerary expense ledgers. When we matched payout dates to disappearances, the spiderweb tightened.
"One hundred and seventy-seven payments in the last nine months," Cobbs said. "All to the same cluster of anonymous wallets. All tied back to those 'reconstruction' shells."
But the truth, once dug out, was darker than any of us expected.
Fake death reports. Soldiers "killed in action" whose bodies were never recovered. Refugees "lost" during transport convoys. Civilians who "vanished" after raids.
Sonya's voice was brittle glass. "They didn't vanish. Rourke had them kidnapped. Sold them. Black market rings use the war as cover, he passes them off as corpses, collects state payouts, and pockets what he gets from the traffickers."
Felix added, almost whispering, "I cross-checked names. Some of those listed as 'dead'… we treated them. We saved them. And then they just… disappeared. He took them right out from under us."
Silence fell, broken only by the patter of rain against broken panes.
I gripped the table hard enough my knuckles turned white. My pulse thundered. "He feeds on the missing. Uses war's smoke as his veil."
Virginia's voice was steady, but her eyes burned. "It's worse than profiteering. He's trading lives. Soldiers, civilians, anyone who can fetch a price."
The urge to move, to strike, surged hot through my veins. The thought of confronting Rourke, dragging him into the same darkness he sold others into, it took everything I had to stay seated.
Cobbs saw it. He leaned in, voice low. "Boss, don't. Not yet. We're no good to anyone if we jump without a plan."
I swallowed hard, forcing air into lungs that wanted only to roar. "He deserves worse than chains. Worse than a cell."
Virginia's hand brushed my sleeve, grounding me. "But evidence will gut him louder than rage ever could. Let's make sure the world sees what he is."
Hours later, I stood in Adawe's office, the Thorns' evidence spread across her desk like open wounds. Files. Photographs. Names of the "dead" who weren't dead at all.
Her eyes darkened as she read. "This… this is enough. Rourke will face trial. This will bring him to justice."
My voice was a rasp. "Justice? He sells people like livestock. Chains don't balance that weight."
Her gaze snapped to mine. "You mean death."
I didn't confirm. Didn't deny. The silence between us said more than words.
Adawe shook her head slowly, the weight of command in every line of her face. "That's not for us to decide, Rose. Not you, not me. Our job is to reveal the truth, not play executioner."
Her words cut, but they didn't cool the fire in my chest. Instead, I packed the files Adawe told me to and watched her staff prepare the warrants. I watched Steve and Cobbs send subpoenas into the dark and Marco plane tickets to the investigators who would need to be where the paper said they should be. I watched Sonya and Felix move to secure the witnesses who would need protection through the trial.
On the morning the warrants flew, a courier boy pushed an envelope under our door. Inside was a single line: They know you know. No signature. No emblem. A cheap cigar pressed against the paper like a smug punctuation.
I felt that old animal twist inside me, hunger sharpened by the knowledge we were close, but I also felt something I had not felt when the war still roared: a kind of terrible, steady hope. The law could be slow. It could be polite. But it could also be a long, coordinated hammer when we learned how to wield it with patience and cruelty that matched intent.
Adawe looked at me once more before she left for the tribunal offices. "You did well," she said. "You and your Thorns built a case a dozen detectives couldn't have assembled in months."
"The right thing," I said, almost by reflex.
She smiled, a small, brittle thing. "We did what the world will recognize as right. If we are lucky, it will be enough."
I believed then that it might be. I also believed that when the gavel slammed and the cell closed, some dark corner of the world would still smell like money and blood. Some men would adapt. Some laws would bend. And if the scales failed, I would have to decide whether I would let them.
For now, we tightened our watches and handed the paper to those who wore the suits for a living. We fed the media the names of shell companies and the immutable facts that could not be argued away. We prepared for the inevitable backlash: threats, smears, a Talon counter-move. Because if we had taught them anything by our digging, it was this, Rourke could not hide in quiet streets any longer. The world would watch. The world would judge.
And if the world judged wrong, maybe I'll be there to correct it.