Kieran's POV
I call Ro before I get in the car.
My hands don't shake. My voice is sure. But my ability is doing something new -- it's pushing outward in all directions at once, like a hand pressed flat on the inside of a glass bowl, probing for cracks in everything around me at once. It does this when the threat level goes above a certain point. When there are more things that can break than things that I can hold onto.
That number is extremely high at the moment.
"Talk," says Ro. She answers on the first ring, which means she has been awake, which means she already knows something is wrong before I tell her.
"The one with the serial number I sent you," I reply. "Tell me all.
I hear keys. Quick. Ro types like she does everything, like she's mad at the keyboard for being slower than her brain. "Military-grade. pre-outbreak production run Created 14 months ago for a specific government purchase order.A pause. "Kieran, only one division was sanctioned for this batch.
"Moonborn Initiative," I say.
Silence. "Yes." She says. Now more quiet.
I look out the windshield to the empty road. That chip was left for me by someone in Helene Strait's program. Not for Marcus. Not for the woman who sat in that car an hour and a half. For me specifically, in a location no one should know about, placed with the precision of someone who knows exactly how I work. "The plate," I say. "The automobile.
More keyboarding. "Shell company. Registered under a name that doesn't belong to any real person. Created 8 months ago.She stops again. "The same month the Moonborn Initiative launched.
So the car, the chip, the woman, it all traces back to the same program. Not to Helene Strait. Running something alongside that program to someone within it. Something Strait doesn't know about, or the chip wouldn't have been left for me to find. It would have been reported I'd have a folder already, with red letters. "Yara Osei," I say. "Tell me what you can find."
Longest pause yet. "Where'd you get that name?"
You did it for me. Eleven minutes ago. "Serial number trace.
"I know what I sent you. Her voice is different. At lower. More carefully. I say, Where did you get it before that? Kieran — Yara Osei's file in the Initiative is classified to a level I've never seen on an individual analyst. Not a department. Not a program. One. Person. Her file is more locked than Helene Strait's.
I let that sit there.
An analyst with a higher clearance protection than the commander of the program she's in. This is not some junior employee who went rogue and got away with it. That's someone who is sheltered by something above Strait." Someone in that program knows Yara and has decided that she stays right where she is.
Yara Osei is not a leaker.
She's a plant. Someone else's plant. Within the Strait program. Which means the Moonborn Initiative isn't a single group. There are at least two — one that Strait runs, and one that runs Strait without her knowing it.
I open my notebook. I write one word on a clean page.
Asset or danger.
I look at it. "Ro," I say. "How long has Yara been a part of the Initiative?
"Typing.Her date of personnel entry was 14 months agoA breath. "Kieran. That's the week you came back.
I drive home to my apartment with every window cracked open because the air in the car feels too small. I have to think and I think better when I can breathe out.
Somebody put Yara in the Initiative fourteen months ago. The same week I returned in a parking garage three hundred miles east With only the clothes I died in. This isn't an accident. This program makes predictive files on people before they come back, so there are no coincidences. Everything in this system is intentional. It's all timed.
Which means someone predicted my comeback too.
Not Nadia's. Mine.
I park and go upstairs and spread it all out on the table and I stand over it and I see the shape of what I have been missing. I have been thinking of it as a division into two sides, us and them. The Initiative and the Returned. Nadia and Helene Strait
There is, however, a third side.
Someone above Strait who had foreseen both of us, put Yara inside to watch the show, and has been waiting for something. I don't know what. Yet. But they gave me that chip this morning. So the waiting's over. They're ready to go. And they decided to tell me, not Nadia, meaning they know the difference between us. They know I'm the one that schemes. They know I'll be the one who understands what the chip means.
They are purposely addressing me in my tongue.
My phone vibrates. Ro again. No call. A file transfer. I open it up.
It is a picture. Old. Grainy. Group of people standing outside of a building I do not recognize. Ro has red-circled two faces.
The first face belongs to Yara Osei. More down. Pre-Initiative. Standing with the ease of someone who doesn't yet know what she's going to become.
My blood stops cold at the second face.
That's because I know the second face. Someone I haven't seen in any of my lifetimes. In any file, any photograph, any security feed. Someone I never said the name of out loud because there was no reason to because in my last timeline this person died in the first month of the outbreak quietly without connection to anything important.
Except they're standing beside Yara Osei in a photo from four years ago.
And beneath the picture Ro has written three words.
Source located.
My ability explodes.
Because the second face in that picture, the one that's been above Strait all this time, the one that predicted our returns, the one that planted Yara and built the third side and has been waiting fourteen months for this very moment—
Felix Okafor is.
The man to whom Nadia had told everything this morning.