Reed waited until the last of her sobs thinned out into harsh, uneven breaths.
The room was still the same box,concrete, metal, too‑bright strip of light—but the air felt heavier now, thick with pain and the metallic taste of fear.
Ariel's wrists ached inside the padded cuffs. Her back burned hot and cold around the wound. Sweat chilled on her skin.
"Look at you," Reed said lightly, sitting back down on the reversed stool in front of her. "Still upright. Impressive."
She lifted her head, hair plastered to her cheek, eyes bloodshot and furious. "You're a coward," she rasped. "Hiding behind stories and straps."
"Oh, we're back to that," he said. "Good. Anger is more interesting than whimpering."
"Whatever you said about Chris was a lie," she pushed out. "You're trying to turn me against him. It's not going to work."
Reed's smile sharpened. "Which version?" he asked. "The 'he's your brother' part, or the 'your life has always been one big transaction' part?"
"He's not—" She bit off the rest. The word brother stuck in her throat, tangled now with the way his voice had broken on the tracker.
Reed watched that hesitation like a hawk.
"Tell you what," he said, voice dropping into a more intimate cadence. "Let's rewind a little further. Back before the shop. Before the crash. Before the sweet couple who read you bedtime stories and taught you how to shelve books alphabetically."
"I don't remember anything before that," Ariel said.
"Of course you don't," Reed said. "You were a baby. People were very invested in making sure you wouldn't remember."
Her pulse kicked.
"This is how it really started," he said. "Once upon a time, in a hospital that saw more blood than birth plans, a family with a very large criminal empire had a problem. They wanted their little kingdom to grow. They wanted favors. Alliances. They wanted to show the right people they were willing to pay any price."
He leaned forward, resting his folded arms on the chair back.
"And then they had a daughter," he went on. "Second child. First girl. Pretty little bargaining chip with their eyes."
Ariel felt the floor tilt.
"No," she said, too fast. "My parents—"
"Your birth parents," Reed said, slicing neatly through the word. "Not the ones in the car. The ones whose names open doors in Arlo's world even now. They had big dreams and a boy already in line—eight years old, on the edge of understanding just how dirty their money was."
Chris at eight. Too small, in her mind, to be standing in any of this.
"When you were born," Reed said, "there were already whispers. Deals. Buyers. Do you know how valuable it is to hand someone a child and say, 'Raise her as yours, remember who gave her to you'?"
Her stomach turned. "They wouldn't," she whispered.
"They did," he said quietly. "You weren't going to be stolen. You were going to be handed over. Paperwork ready. Nurses paid off. A little girl wrapped in a pink blanket, placed into arms that had paid very well for the privilege."
Her breath shortened.
"Your parents," Reed said, "had every intention of selling their daughter to secure their empire. Keep the heir. Trade the spare. It's not new. Just uglier when you put it that bluntly."uppolice
She shook her head, but the motion was small now. "You're making this up," she said. "You have to be."
"If it helps," he said, "there's documentation. Contracts. A ledger entry with your date of birth and a very large number next to it. Johnson's seen it. Probably wished he'd thought of it first."
He let that sit, then continued.
"But here's the part no one saw coming," he said. "The plan went sideways. The same night you were supposed to be quietly transferred into the buyer's waiting car, someone else hit the hospital. Not for you. For something else entirely. Guns. Panic. Smoke. That kind of thing tends to complicate baby‑trafficking logistics."
She saw flashes she'd never been sure were real memory—sirens, lights, people shouting, the smell of something burning.
"In the chaos," Reed said, "you got lost. Not to the buyer. Not back to Mommy and Daddy's arms. Someone grabbed the wrong bassinet or saw an opportunity or just panicked with a screaming newborn in their hands and ran."
His eyes were steady on hers.
"You were stolen," he said. "Out of the worst possible plan, by a different kind of thief."
Her fingers curled, nails biting into her palms.
"That doesn't make any sense," she said. "How do you even know—"
"Because when big deals go wrong," he said, "people keep receipts. Your parents lost face. Lost money. Lost their leverage. They didn't just shrug and say 'oh well.' They tore the city apart trying to find out who robbed them. And in that mess, there was one witness who saw enough to remember."
Her throat went dry. "Chris," she whispered.
Reed smiled, small and sharp. "Eight years old," he said. "Old enough to be in the hospital visiting his new sister. Old enough to know something was off when his parents wouldn't meet his eyes. Old enough to be standing in the hall when alarms went off and a man in a uniform walked past carrying a baby that looked exactly like the one he'd just seen in the nursery."
She pictured it—small boy, too big eyes, pressed against a wall while adults ran.
"He saw you go," Reed said. "He called out. No one listened. There were bigger problems. He ran after you. Lost you in the smoke and screaming. One minute, sister in a bassinet. Next minute, gone."
Her eyes burned. "He told me he thought I died," she said.
"Maybe that's what they told him," Reed said. "Easier to say 'she didn't make it' than 'we were selling her and someone else stole our merchandise.' Eight‑year‑olds aren't supposed to know that kind of thing."
He shifted, that false lightness of his voice dimming at the edges.
"But kids aren't stupid," he said. "He saw enough. Heard enough. Put things together later. He grew up knowing two things: one, his parents were exactly the monsters everyone said they were. And two, somewhere out there was a little sister who'd been lost in the middle of a deal gone bad."
Ariel's breath hitched hard enough to hurt.
"So he went looking," she said.
"He went looking," Reed confirmed. "At first because he couldn't stop seeing that hallway. Then because it gave him something to aim his guilt at. And eventually, because there you were on a security feed—older, alive, standing in front of a bookshop that had never been meant to be yours, with a name no one in his family recognized."
She thought of the way Chris had watched her from across the street. The way he hovered even when she pushed him back.
"If he knew all this," she said, voice shaking, "why didn't he tell me?"
Reed laughed softly. "Because how do you start that conversation?" he asked. " 'Hi, I'm your big brother, our parents were crime lords, and you were originally a down payment on their next expansion'? Doesn't really fit into casual small talk between 'how was your day' and 'want a coffee'."
Tears burned behind her eyes, hot and unwelcome.
"So what," she said. "You want me to hate them. Hate him. Hate everyone."
"I want you to stop pretending this is only about the last few weeks," Reed said. "You were put on a ledger the day you were born. Every choice since has been someone trying to fix, profit off, or ignore that fact."
He sat back a little, studying her face.
"Your parents," he said carefully, "planned to sell you. That's on them. The people who stole you? Who knows what they wanted. Maybe they thought they were saving you. Maybe they were going to sell you themselves and changed their minds. The couple in the car crash? They loved you. They didn't know where you came from. They just wanted a daughter."
"And Chris?" she whispered.
"Chris," Reed said, "has spent twenty years with that night in his head. Watching you disappear and being too small to stop it. Thinking you were dead. Then finding out you weren't. Finding you. Standing outside your shop with that same useless feeling in his chest because now the danger isn't one man in a hallway—it's an entire life he doesn't know how to pull you out of without breaking you."
Her shoulders hunched as far as the cuffs would allow.
"He could have told me," she said, but there was less heat in it now, more hurt.
"He should have," Reed agreed. "But ask yourself: has anyone ever told you the whole truth before? Or have they all given you pieces they thought you could handle and called it love?"
She thought of Arlo rationing information. Mara's half‑answers. Chris's swallowed words.
"You're still using me," she said, grasping for anything solid. "You carved into me. Tied me up. You're not doing this for me."
He flashed a brief, sharp grin. "Of course I'm not," he said. "I'm not your fairy godmother. I'm lighting fires. Under Johnson. Under Chris. Under you. I want to see what you all do when the lies burn off."
He stood, dragging the stool back with a scrape.
"Here's your homework, sunshine," he said, moving toward the door. "When your knight in tarnished armor shows up—and he will, or he'll die trying—ask him what he saw in that hospital hallway. Ask him what our parents planned for you."
"Our," she echoed, the word tasting strange and dangerous.
Reed glanced back, eyes glinting.
"Older brother," he reminded her. "That part wasn't a lie. He's yours. You're his. Doesn't mean either of you gets to like the backstory."
He triggered the panel. The door slid open with a hiss.
"And the best part?" he added, pausing on the threshold. "No matter how this shakes out—whether you forgive him, hate him, or something in between—he's going to hear your scream from tonight every time he closes his eyes and remember that he failed you twice."
The door shut.
Silence rushed in, broken only by her rough breathing.
Ariel stared at the metal, Reed's words ricocheting inside her skull.
Sold.
Stolen.
Saved.
Lost.
Found.
Brother.
Her chest ached, but beneath the swirl of horror and nausea and a grief she hadn't known was hers to feel, one clear thread remained:
If she got out of this room—if she got even one second with Chris without pain between them—she was going to look him in the eye and ask:
What did you see that night?
And this time, she would not let him walk away with half an answer.
The war room had shrunk to the size of the sitting room.
Maps littered the table now—printed satellite shots, street grids, scribbled circles where Reed had safe houses, suspected stashes, rumored bolt‑holes. Phones lay face‑down among them, screens lighting at intervals with updates Arlo dismissed in seconds.
"Run it again," he snapped at the man on the laptop across the encrypted call. "Tower pings, traffic cams, anything that moved within a kilometer of that van. I don't care if it's a milk truck, I want a log."
The speaker crackled. "We've swept city grids twice," the voice said. "Nothing matches a static plate with that make and model after your time stamp. Either it's in a blind spot, or—"
"Or he switched vehicles in a dead zone," Arlo finished. "Yes, I figured that out in the first five minutes. Find the dead zone."
He ended the call without waiting for a reply, jaw clenched so tight it hurt.
Two of his own men stood near the doorway, brought in within the last hour—trusted enough for this, not important enough to be missed if Reed had eyes in the wrong places. Both looked like they'd rather be anywhere else than caught in Arlo Johnson's line of fire.
"You had one job," Arlo said coldly. "Eyes on the perimeter. Explain to me how a van parks two houses down long enough to take a girl out of my basement and none of you see it."
"We were watching the front, boss," one of them said, throat bobbing. "Nothing came up on our end. No unusual foot traffic. The van never pulled into direct line of—"
"Reed has worked for me for years," Arlo cut in. "You thought he was going to use the front door?"
The man flinched. "We—we covered the usual angles—"
"Reed doesn't use usual angles," Arlo said. "That's why he was useful. And that is why you do not assume standard protocols when someone like him is in play."
He scrubbed a hand over his face, the motion more frustrated than he would ever let it look.
"Go downstairs," he said. "Pull every physical log. Check the alley cams again, frame by frame. If so much as a cat twitched wrong within spitting distance of that van, I want to know."
They scattered.
Chris sat on the edge of the sofa with a burner phone in one hand and Mara's tablet in the other, eyes flicking between a map app and a bare‑bones trace program Arlo had let him install on the network.
He looked like he'd been carved down to essentials—no jokes, no easy slouch. Just raw focus wrapped around a coil of guilt.
"Nothing on the emergency frequencies," he said tightly. "No reports of a girl matching her description. No anonymous calls. Reed's not flaunting this."
"He's not hiding either," Arlo said. "He called us."
"On a device we can't trace," Chris shot back. "He knows our toys. He picked the battlefield."
Mara leaned in the doorway, arms folded, watching the two of them burn themselves down.
"Stop," she said.
Neither did.
"Arlo, breathing is free," she added. "You should try it. Chris, if you glare any harder at that tablet, it's going to confess."
"We have forty‑three hours," Arlo said. "Assuming his clock is real. That's not enough time to be gentle."
"Forty‑three hours is an estimation," Mara said. "Your adrenal glands will give out long before that. You want to be useful when we find her, or just a twitchy mess in a suit?"
He shot her a look, then forced himself to drag in a deeper breath.
"Say what you came to say," he said. "You've been standing there with that 'I'm about to ruin your day' face for five minutes."
Chris turned too, picking up on the tension in her shoulders.
"Mara?" he asked.
She hesitated.
"I might have a way to narrow the search," she said. "But you're both going to hate it."
"Try us," Arlo said.
She stepped into the room, crossing to the table. The little steel dish with the dead tracker was still there, a grim centerpiece.
"You're assuming Reed's only contact point was this," she said, nodding to it. "The subcutaneous device in her back. That's the one I took out. That's the one he pinged to make her scream for us."
"Because he wanted us to hear," Arlo said. "To set the clock."
"Exactly," Mara said. "But a man like Reed doesn't put all his eggs in one incision. The way he spoke, the way the signal came through… I don't think that was the only hardware he used."
Chris's grip tightened on the tablet. "You think there's more in her," he said quietly.
Mara nodded once. "A backup," she said. "Smaller. Less invasive in terms of surgery. Easier to hide. Somewhere none of us checked."
"We checked her entire back," Arlo said. "I saw the scan from the clinic. If there was something else—"
"You scanned where we cut," Mara said. "Front. Side. Back. The obvious places. The easy places." She met his eyes. "You did not scan behind her ear."
A beat of silence.
Chris straightened slowly. "What?"
"The mastoid area," Mara said, tapping just behind her own ear. "Bone's close to the surface. Plenty of nerves. Lots of small, delicate vessels. Not ideal for big, clunky devices—but perfect for something tiny that doesn't need much to piggyback on neural signals."
Arlo's mind jumped ahead. "A microtransmitter," he said. "Not just a tracker. A signal reflector. Something that can send even if he kills main power."
Mara nodded. "He said he'd contacted her from another chip," she said. "We assumed metaphor. I don't think it was."
Chris's stomach dropped. "If it's there, why haven't we picked it up?" he demanded. "We scanned that house with every toy you own after the warehouse."
"You scanned for standard frequencies," Mara said. "For bigger signatures. The ones buyers and runners usually use. If Reed got his hardware from higher up, it might be piggybacking on something else. A medical band. A hearing aid frequency. Even certain comms used in hospitals. It would fly under our radar because we weren't looking for that pattern."
Arlo's jaw clenched. "Bottom line," he said. "Is it there?"
"I don't know," Mara said. "I can't see through bone and hair with my mind. But if it is, I might be able to get a signal from it. Force it to ping back. Narrow the radius."
Chris latched onto the one phrase that didn't sound hypothetical. "Then do it," he said.
Mara didn't move.
"It's not that simple," she said. "The area behind the ear is… sensitive. Thin skin. Lots of nerves. If I send a strong enough pulse to trigger a response, she's going to feel it. Hard."
"How hard," Chris asked, voice flat.
Mara looked at him, then at Arlo.
"Think ice pick migraine," she said. "But coming from inside. Sharp, intense. Short, if I do it right. But… bad. And given what she's already been through today—stab wounds, extractions, panic—her threshold is not great."
Chris's eyes went dark. "So you want to hurt her more," he said.
"I don't want to," Mara snapped. "I'm telling you the cost of this option. Reed is counting on us not taking it. On us being so wrapped up in not causing her one more second of pain that we let him keep moving her blind."
Arlo's fingers tapped once against the table, the only outward sign of tension. "Can you limit it?" he asked. "Duration, intensity."
"I can calibrate down," she said. "Try to hit the smallest possible window that still gets us something. It won't be nothing. She'll feel it. She may even… scream. Again."
Chris flinched like she'd hit him.
"No," he said. "We're not using her like a—like a signal booster. She's not a—"
"—piece of equipment," Mara finished, softer. "I know. She's my patient. My… friend. But she is also the person Reed took. The one person in this city I know for sure isn't collateral in anyone else's plan. If she were here, awake, and I told her, 'I can hurt you for five seconds and it might help us find you, or I can keep you comfortable while he moves you farther away'—what do you think she'd choose?"
He opened his mouth, closed it, chest heaving.
"She'd tell you to flip the switch," Arlo said quietly.
Both of them looked at him.
"She walked into my office knowing who I was and what I've done because she thought it might save Chris," he went on. "She stayed in that depot when she could have run. She let Mara cut her open in a basement with a local anesthetic because it meant getting a bug out. She will always choose pain if the alternative is someone else suffering for her."
Mara's throat bobbed. "He's right," she said.
Chris scrubbed a hand over his face, fingers trembling. "So what," he said. "We sit here. You send a shock through her head. She screams and Reed laughs and—"
"And we capture the echo," Arlo cut in. "Pain or not, if we can get a bounce, we can triangulate. Narrow from 'an entire city' to 'this quadrant' to 'these blocks'. It's the first concrete line we've had."
"And if we miss?" Chris demanded. "If all we do is hurt her and give him more ammo?"
"Then we go back to maps and men and hoping Reed gets sloppy," Arlo said. "I don't like those odds."
Silence settled thick between them.
Mara stepped closer to the table, placing a small, palm‑sized device down next to the dead tracker. It looked like a sleek, nondescript black stone with a single recessed light.
"I built this for field use," she said. "Originally to wake up certain implanted monitors in unresponsive patients. It sends a very specific pulse at a very specific frequency. If there's a compatible device in range, it'll ping back. If not, it does nothing except make the target a lot more uncomfortable for a moment."
She met both their eyes, one by one.
"If she's got something behind her ear," she said, "this might talk to it. Reed will assume we won't go that far because it means intentionally causing her pain. He's betting on our softness."
Arlo's hand curled into a fist. "He's miscalculating," he said.
Chris stared at the little device like it was a live grenade.
"You're asking me to sign off on hurting her," he said, voice barely above a whisper. "Again."
"I'm asking you to weigh five seconds of targeted pain against forty‑three hours of what he's already doing," Mara said. "And against the possibility that without this, we don't find her in time."
He looked like he was going to break something—or himself—trying to hold all of it.
Arlo stepped around the table, coming to stand opposite him.
"You're her brother," Arlo said. "You get a say. But this isn't just about what feels right. It's about what gets her back."
"If we get her back with one more trauma you put there," Chris said, "how is that different from what everyone else has done to her since she was born?"
"Because she'll be alive to be angry about it," Arlo said. "To scream at us. To leave. To choose."
He held Chris's gaze. No flinch. No softness now. Just the brutal calculus he'd been raised on, turned toward something that wasn't just profit.
"Reed assumes we will protect her from every sting," Arlo said. "That we will sit here and wring our hands over her comfort while he rewrites her insides. He thinks he knows the limits of what we'll risk for her."
"And do you?" Chris asked quietly.
Arlo's jaw worked. "I know mine just moved," he said.
Mara cleared her throat gently. "We don't have to decide this second," she said. "I need ten minutes to calibrate anyway. To set the output low enough that it doesn't fry anything important. Once it's ready, you two tell me if I push the button."
She picked up the device again, the weight of it far heavier than its size, and turned toward the door.
At the threshold, she paused.
"For what it's worth," she said, not looking back, "if it were me strapped to that chair, and she was here with this in her hand… I'd want her to use it."
Then she was gone, footsteps fading down the hall toward her med room and her tools.
The room felt colder without her.
Chris sank down onto the edge of the sofa, elbows on his knees, hands dangling between them. He stared at the floor.
"I don't know how to do this," he said, voice hoarse. "Every choice is wrong."
Arlo looked at the spot where Mara had stood, then at the door, then finally at Chris.
"Welcome to my world," he said quietly. "You pick the wrong that hurts least. Or the wrong that has a chance of getting you to a right later."
"That philosophy built this mess," Chris snapped.
"And it might be the only thing that gets her out of it," Arlo replied.
They sat there, the little room holding the weight of the decision waiting for them down the hall:
how much pain they were willing to let touch the one person both of them had come, in different ways, to love—
and whether, for the first time, they were willing to be the ones to put it there if it meant pulling her back.
Mara's "ten minutes" stretched into twenty.
Not because she was slow. Because she was careful.
In the med room, she laid out what she needed with the same precision she used for scalpels and sutures: the palm‑sized device, a diagnostic pad piggybacked onto Arlo's network, a pair of noise‑dampening headsets for her and whoever else was listening.
She calibrated the pulse amplitude down, and down again, until the software warned her the return signal might be too faint to read.
"Too bad," she muttered. "We'll strain."
When she finally stepped back into the sitting room, Arlo and Chris were exactly where she'd left them—two different brands of wreckage.
Arlo stood, the stiffness in his shoulders carved deeper. Chris sat, leaning forward, forearms on his knees, head bowed like he'd been holding the same thought on a loop and hadn't found anywhere to put it.
Mara set the device on the table between them.
"Okay," she said quietly. "Here's what I've got."
They both looked up.
"I've tuned it to a narrow band," she said. "Medical telemetry range. If there's a compatible chip behind her ear, we should see a response spike here." She tapped the tablet she'd synced to the device. "I can't guarantee position from one ping. But if he triggers it again and we're already locked on the frequency, we might get angle and distance. Enough to triangulate with Arlo's people."
"And the cost?" Arlo asked.
"I've cut the pulse strength as low as I can while still hoping to wake anything inside bone," Mara said. "Think… electric shock headache. Sharp, focused, a few seconds. Worst case, she vomits or passes out. Best case, she swears creatively in my direction and we get a blip on a graph."
Chris flinched at vomits or passes out.
"Will it damage anything?" he asked. "Nerves, hearing…?"
"Unlikely," Mara said. "Single pulse, low intensity, short duration. The skin and tissue back there are delicate, but we're not drilling holes in her skull. This is more taser than scalpel. Just tuned for tech instead of muscles."
He stared at the device as if he could see his sister through it.
"What if he knows?" Chris said. "What if he realizes we're using her as a… beacon and punishes her more?"
"Reed already thinks we're squeamish," Mara said. "If he notices, he'll be surprised. If he doesn't, we get data. Either way, he's torturing her whether we touch this or not. That part doesn't depend on us."
The thought made Chris's hands curl into fists on his knees.
Arlo had been silent, eyes on the device, the line between his brows deepening.
Mara looked between them. "I'm not going to push this without you two on board," she said. "If you say no, we find another way. We keep burning phones and favors and hope a camera somewhere saw what ours didn't."
Silence settled for a few beats.
Then Chris exhaled, shaky but deliberate.
"If she makes it home," he said, "and finds out we had this and we didn't use it because we didn't want to hear her scream again…" His mouth twisted. "She'd kill us."
"Slowly," Mara agreed.
He lifted his head, eyes hollow but steadier. "Do it," he said. "Hit it as low as you can. As fast as you can. If it gives us anything—anything—we take it."
Mara nodded once, no triumph in it. Just acceptance.
She glanced at Arlo. "You?"
He didn't hesitate.
"Yes," he said. "We use every tool we have. That includes her pain if it buys her freedom."
There was a bleak honesty in it that hurt.
Mara picked up the black device, its single light dark for now. "Then we wait for his next contact," she said. "When he pings her chip to make us listen, I'll piggyback on the signal. That's when I hit her. One pulse, right as the line opens. It'll hurt, but it'll also give us the cleanest return path."
Chris swallowed. "And until then?"
"Until then," Arlo said, "we work."
He started issuing orders without raising his voice.
"Chris, you and I are going to map every Reed‑related location in this city," he said. "Not just safe houses. Hotels he's used under aliases, bars he likes, storage units rented with shell accounts. We build a heat map. Wherever those overlap with the tower sectors that handled the last transmission, we mark them high priority."
He turned to Mara. "You stay on comms," he said. "If that thing so much as blinks, you shout."
"Glad to be reduced to a human alarm," she said, but there was no real bite in it.
They moved.
Chris pulled up lists—addresses, old mission notes, half‑remembered meet‑up points Reed had used in the past. Arlo overlaid them on maps, pattern‑hunting, his brain switching into the ruthless analytic mode that had built his empire.
Mara sat at the table with the device and the tablet, monitoring a flat line that she desperately wanted to see spike.
Minutes bled into an hour.
Night thickened outside the windows, turning the glass into dark mirrors. The clock on the wall ticked loud in the quiet.
Once, a phone rang. Arlo snatched it up, listened, eyes narrowing, then hung up.
"Nothing?" Chris asked.
"Rumor of a van in Dockside," Arlo said. "Wrong plates. Wrong model. Wrong time."
"How many wrong vans does one city have," Chris muttered.
"Too many," Arlo said. "Not enough to hide in forever."
Silence fell again.
Then the device on the table blinked—just once, a faint red pulse, almost shy.
All three of them froze.
"Got you," Mara whispered.
An instant later, the steel dish vibrated where it sat, the dead tracker in it coming alive with the same soft buzz as before.
The receiver unit chimed as it picked up the incoming connection.
Ariel's breath poured into the room, ragged and too fast.
Mara's thumb hovered over the pulse trigger.
"Now," Arlo said.
She pressed.
The black device gave a low hum, almost inaudible. The tablet screen jumped, a spike lancing up from the baseline.
Far away—on a concrete floor, in a chair—something behind Ariel's ear fired like a tiny, internal lightning strike.
A searing line of pain shot through her head, arcing from skull to jaw to the back of her eye. It was pure, bright, white‑hot—so sudden and sharp she couldn't even form a word, just a strangled sound, half gasp, half cry.
The receiver caught it.
Chris flinched like he'd been hit himself.
"Jesus," he hissed, gripping the edge of the table.
On the tablet, numbers scroll‑jumped—frequency, delay, a ping return from somewhere in the city grid.
"Come on, come on," Mara muttered, fingers dancing on the screen, locking onto the returning echo before it faded. "Talk to me, you little bastard…"
The spike settled into a pattern—faint, but there.
"Northwest quadrant," she said. "Sector twelve. Distance… eight, maybe ten kilometers from us, depending on interference."
Arlo was already moving, swinging a map around, stabbing at a section with his finger. "That's the old industrial strip—garages, warehouses, three of my former drop sites."
The muffled sound of Reed's laugh crackled out of the receiver, a split‑second delayed by the tech.
"Somebody found a new toy," he drawled. "Bold of you, Johnson. I didn't think you had it in you."
Ariel's breath hitched. Her head throbbed. "What—" she managed. "What did you—"
"Don't worry, sunshine," Reed said, mock‑soothing. "That wasn't me. That was your friends. Hurts, doesn't it?"
Back in the safe house, Chris's hand tightened around the back of a chair until the wood creaked.
"Again," he said through his teeth to Mara. "Can you hit it again?"
"No," Mara said sharply, eyes still on the data. "One pulse per window. Anything more and I risk frying the chip—or her."
"We got enough," Arlo said. "We know the sector. We focus there."
Reed's voice slid through the speaker, all bright malice. "You're learning," he said. "Using her as a compass. Thought you'd flinch more."
Arlo stared at the receiver, expression carved in stone. "Keep talking," he said softly. "Every word narrows you down."
Reed chuckled. "Tick tock," he said. "Let's see if you can find the right box before she runs out of screams."
The line went dead again.
The device's light dimmed, the spike on Mara's screen tapering back toward the baseline.
Silence rushed in behind it.
Mara's shoulders dropped a fraction, as if she'd been holding the breath the whole city had taken.
"She's in sector twelve," she said, more firmly now, tapping the map. "The signal bounced off a tower near the industrial strip. With the delay we got, she's not at the edge. Closer to the center cluster."
Arlo nodded once. "I've got three properties there we've used in the last five years," he said. "Plus two Reed favors. We hit them all."
"We don't have time to be neat," Chris said. "We go hard. We go loud if we have to."
Mara glanced at him. "You okay?" she asked quietly.
He swallowed, eyes dark and wild. "No," he said. "But I can move. That's enough."
Arlo folded the map, stuffing it into his jacket. The shift back into command was complete now—not because he felt less, but because he had somewhere to put it.
"I'll take a team to the strip," he said. "Chris, you're with me."
Chris's jaw tightened. "You think I'm staying here after—"
"I just said you're with me," Arlo cut in. "You're not negotiating your way onto this; you're already on it. But you listen when I call shots out there. You don't rush blind because he says your name. She doesn't need you dying on the doorstep."
Mara stepped between them, pressing the small device into Arlo's hand. "Take it," she said. "If you get closer, the next time he pings her, I might be able to narrow it to a single block."
"You're not coming," Chris said, frowning.
"Someone has to stay and coordinate," she said. "And if you bring her back bleeding, someone has to not be half concussed from sprinting through warehouses."
She caught his sleeve, tugging him down enough to press a quick, fierce kiss to his temple.
"Bring her home," she said. "Then we can all fall apart properly."
He nodded, throat working.
Arlo reached for his gun, for a second holstered piece he rarely bothered with, for keys, burner phones, a slim earpiece. Each movement was clean, practiced. Only his eyes betrayed that this wasn't just another operation.
He met Mara's gaze. "If he calls again—"
"I'll squeeze every bit of data out of it," she said. "And I won't hit her twice in one window, I promise."
He nodded once, then jerked his head toward the door. "Let's go," he said to Chris.
They left the sitting room together, two men who had never agreed on much—
now united by the same singular, burning goal, armed with maps, guns, and the knowledge of the pain they'd allowed to touch the one person both of them refused to lose.
Behind them, Mara sat back down at the table, fingers hovering over the tablet, eyes burning.
"Hang on, Ari," she whispered to the empty room. "We're coming."
The device on the table lay dark, inert for now.
Somewhere in sector twelve, behind concrete and steel, the tiny chip at the base of Ariel's skull sat dormant again—
waiting for the next cruel buzz, the next scream,
and, if they were fast enough,
the moment the signal became a trail instead of a taunt.