The five Merit Points from the Weeping Spot cleansing felt like combat pay. It was a meager sum for facing down the concentrated despair of a hundred lost souls, but it pushed my balance to twenty-five points. I was slowly, painstakingly crawling my way out of supernatural poverty. As Kevin and I walked away from the now-peaceful North Avenue Beach, leaving the setting sun behind us, the conversation shifted from the spiritual back to the grimly terrestrial. The ghost of Jessica Miller, a constant cold presence in my chest, was stirring. We had dealt with the sideshow; it was time to get back to the main event.
"Harold Finch," I said, the name feeling like a shard of glass in my mouth. "We have to keep the pressure on him. He's rattled, but he'll recover if we give him time."
"I agree," Kevin said, his easygoing demeanor replaced by the focused intensity I'd seen when he was setting his trap at the Lily Pool. "Whispers and rumors only work for so long. You need a cannon. Someone who can take your evidence and fire it directly into the public square. And for that, we need Sarah Jenkins."
The name sounded familiar, but I couldn't place it. "Who is she?"
"She's the best investigative journalist in Chicago, maybe in the country," Kevin explained as we walked towards the rumble of Clark Street. "She used to be the star reporter for the Tribune. Broke the city hall corruption scandal a few years back. Took down two aldermen and a state senator. She got too good, made too many powerful enemies. The paper, under pressure, tried to sideline her. So she quit and went independent. Now she runs a small, subscriber-funded investigative blog called The Scorpion's Sting."
He hailed a cab, and we climbed in. "She's relentless, she's paranoid, and she trusts no one. She's been sued by billionaires and threatened by mobsters. She doesn't bend, and she doesn't break. If she takes a story, she sees it through to the end, no matter what. She's perfect."
"But you said it yourself," I countered, a knot of anxiety tightening in my stomach. "She trusts no one. Why would she trust us? We're two guys in their twenties with a story about a ghost and a conspiracy."
Kevin gave me a sharp look. "That's the first rule of meeting Sarah Jenkins: we don't mention ghosts. We don't mention anything supernatural. Not a word. As far as she's concerned, you're a low-level employee at Innovate Solutions who stumbled onto something, got scared, and found me through a mutual acquaintance. I'm just here to make sure you don't get yourself killed. We are presenting a corporate malfeasance and murder case. Nothing more."
The cab dropped us off in Logan Square, in front of a grungy, repurposed warehouse that had been converted into shared artist lofts and workspaces. There was no sign for The Scorpion's Sting. Kevin led me up three flights of creaking wooden stairs to a heavy steel door with a simple, stenciled number: 3B. He knocked a specific, rhythmic pattern.
A moment later, the door was unbolted from the inside with a series of loud, metallic clunks. It opened just enough for a single, piercing blue eye to peer out at us.
"Zhang," a woman's voice said. It was raspy, like gravel and cigarette smoke. "I told you not to come here unless the world was ending."
"It might be, for someone," Kevin said calmly. "This is the friend I told you about. He needs your help."
The door opened fully. Sarah Jenkins was not what I expected. She was a small, wiry woman in her late forties, with a shock of short, messy blonde hair, and a face that was a roadmap of sleepless nights and too much coffee. She was wearing a faded band t-shirt, ripped jeans, and a look of profound skepticism. Her office, if you could call it that, was a chaotic mess of overflowing filing cabinets, whiteboards covered in frantic scribbles and interconnected photos, and a desk buried under stacks of papers and at least five empty coffee mugs. The air smelled of stale caffeine and ozone from the humming computer equipment.
She looked me up and down, her gaze so intense I felt like she was performing an X-ray of my soul. "You're the source," she stated, not as a question. "You look terrified. That's either a good sign or a very bad one."
She stepped aside and gestured for us to come in. "You've got five minutes to convince me not to throw you down the stairs. Talk."
We sat in two rickety chairs opposite her desk. Kevin, to his credit, took the lead. He laid out the story with a calm, compelling logic, stripping away all the supernatural elements. He presented me as Alex Carter, a junior employee who had discovered evidence that his boss, Harold Finch, had stolen a major project from a deceased colleague, Jessica Miller, and that her death in a single-car accident was highly suspicious and potentially connected to her discovery of the theft.
Sarah listened without interruption, her expression unreadable, her fingers steepled under her chin. She looked like a predator patiently watching its prey, deciding if it was worth the effort to pounce.
"Suspicion isn't a story," she said flatly when Kevin had finished. "Corporate backstabbing happens every day. It's ugly, but it's not illegal. And a 'suspicious' car accident is just an accident until you can prove otherwise. What do you have besides a gut feeling?"
This was my cue. My heart was pounding. This was it. The moment of truth.
"I have proof," I said, my voice barely a whisper. I tried to channel the confidence Kevin had shown, but I just sounded like a scared kid. Which, to be fair, was exactly what I was.
"Everyone says they have proof," Sarah shot back, her eyes narrowing. "Usually it's a blurry photo or a recording of a drunk conversation. What is it?"
I needed to give her something specific, something she couldn't ignore. I focused inward, on the cold presence of Jessica. Help me, I thought. What would convince her? A detail. Something only an insider would know.
A memory, sharp and clear, surfaced from Jessica's residual consciousness. It wasn't an emotion; it was a fact. Project Firefly.
"Before it was officially called Project Nightingale," I said, the words coming out in a rush, "its internal development codename was 'Project Firefly.' Finch changed it after… after Jessica was gone, to erase her connection to it. That name never appeared in any public documents."
Sarah Jenkins froze. Her skeptical mask cracked for just a fraction of a second, but I saw it. A flicker of genuine interest. A predator that had just caught the scent of real blood. That was a detail she could verify, a piece of information that wasn't public knowledge.
"And," I said, pressing my advantage, my confidence growing. "I have the emails. And his search history from his work computer. From the night before her car crashed."
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the encrypted USB drive, placing it gently on the one clean spot on her cluttered desk.
"It's all on here," I said. "Everything you need. But I can't tell you how I got it. He can't know who I am. He's… dangerous."
Sarah stared at the small USB drive as if it were a live grenade. She didn't touch it. She looked at me, then at Kevin, then back at the drive. The five minutes she had given us had long since passed. The air in the room was thick with tension.
Finally, she leaned back in her chair, the springs groaning in protest. She picked up a pen and began tapping it on her desk, the rhythmic click the only sound in the room.
"Leave it," she said, her voice flat and devoid of emotion. "I'll look at it. I make no promises. If it's real, you'll know when the story breaks. If it's fake, or if you're trying to play me, I will find you, and you will regret it. Now get out of my office."
She turned to her computer screen, dismissing us completely. The audience was over.
Kevin gave me a slight nod, and we stood up and walked out, the door slamming and the bolts clicking shut behind us. We were back in the dusty, quiet hallway of the old warehouse. I let out a breath I didn't realize I had been holding for the past twenty minutes.
We had done it. We had passed the most dangerous weapon in Chicago into the hands of its most dangerous woman. The war was no longer just ours. We had given our cannon to the queen of the scorpions. Now, all we could do was wait and pray she decided to fire it.