Page 283 of Fractured Allegiance

I tell him, “Then don’t flinch when you see what’s inside.”

He grins for a few seconds, none of his softness left. “I never flinch.”

Lydia, don’t be a goddamn cliché, I think, and then I put my hands on the cold steel of the door and match his movement. Silas slides to the panel, fingers moving over wires and contacts. He’s the kind of man who grew up around locks and codes. There’s a fluency in his hands I know only from watching him handle a gun. He finds the line that will make the latch surrender. Sparks pop. The mechanism groans and then gives.

The door opens into a room that smells like secrets. Rows of server racks stand like darkened altars, humming with a low energy that could wake the dead. Banked cabinets line the walls, heavy vault drawers with brass handles and paper tags. Monitors stare with dead eyes. In the center, a single console pulses green. On the far wall, a monitor displays a list. Names scroll like an indictment.

My throat tightens. I know the layout before my eyes register it. The architecture of it—stacked servers, mirrored backups, redundant arrays—mirrors something I thought had died with Miramont neuro-clinic. Years ago, they called it Echo: a behavioral mapping system built inside the clinic to study compliance and manipulation. It recorded people—every lie, every surrender, every trigger—and turned them into data. What began as research became control, the foundation for blackmail and obedience. This vault is its resurrection, the same skeleton dressed in a better suit. They didn’t just store money and names here. They preserved behavior. They preserved leverage. They preserved control.

“Christ,” Silas says behind me. He has that hollow, sudden sound in his chest that people make when they’re opening a wound they can’t close. “This goes deeper than I thought.”

I move down the aisles, the racks casting ladders of shadow across my face. Files glitter like small white teeth on the console. I touch one tag. It bears my name. My old file number is printed like a scar. Images blink on a monitor—clips, transcripts, faces. Mine, cataloged. Not just names. Patterns. Triggers. Loops.

I should feel violated. I do. But beneath the violation there’s a different, colder sensation. This archive is power. It explains the ease with which men like Drazen bought compliance. It explains how they blackmailed mayors and judges. It explains why Miramont moved like a machine. Someone had the blueprints to the city’s decisions and they were kept in a tidy, fireproof box.

Silas watches me pick up a drive. He studies the label: Trial 14—Heretic Loop. He doesn’t look surprised. He looks like a man who’s been told the worst kind of truth and is cataloguing pain by the second.

“You knew this was possible,” he says. “Echo seems like—” He stops, gropes for the right word, and fails. “You didn’t. Not on this scale.”

“No one outside the walls did,” I say. My fingers curl around the drive like it’s a snake that could bite. “They took what the system learned about me and made a ledger.”

Elias moves past me, hand brushing my shoulder like a benediction or a warning I can’t tell which. He’s scanned the shelves, counting, measuring, planning. “How long will it take to get them online?” he asks.

Silas clicks through the console. “Hours, if you’re lucky. This is a mirrored system. If we pull one rack, another mirrors it. If we pull both, there’s redundancy. He built fail-safes. Took it with him.”

“That’s why he wanted to get out,” I say. “This is the only kind of currency that keeps men like him alive.”

Elias’s jaw sets. I have a flash of him standing over Ren. When a man sees what he believes is the one thing that keeps the city breathing, he does not hesitate to be merciless protecting it.

“Options,” Silas says. He puts his hands flat on the console and looks at each of us. “We can seize it. We can move the drives and control the ledger. We can sell it back on better terms. Or we destroy it.”

There’s a tenor to his words that makes the room colder. He isn’t listing possibilities as a neutral observer. He is asking us to choose what kind of monsters we want to be.

Elias’s voice is slow. “If you control it, you become the next Drazen. If you destroy it, you become a ghost who took away the only directory for revenge.”

Silas laughs, a short thing with no humor. “Or we do both. Burn the copies and keep the keys. Pocket the leads that matter.” He taps his temple. “Use it just enough to pull the snakes out of their holes, then watch them drown.”

Mara’s voice floats from the doorway where she’s been checking the perimeter. She is careful with her words. She always is. “If you keep any of it, it will always be leveraged. People will die for what you keep. People will turn on you for what you have.”

The choice narrows down to two dark doors. Hold onto power, and then forever fight to keep it. Or erase it and leave the city blind but free of the ledger.

My hand tightens around the drive. The paper tag flaps between my fingers, edges smudged with someone else’s blood. I remember lying on cold slabs at Miramont forever ago and listening to technicians whisper like they ran churches.I remember a voice in the dark program loops into me like prayers. I remember the way loyalty became a data point.

“Whose life are we saving if we keep it?” I ask, and the question is a blade.

Silas steps closer. “If you destroy it, there’s no bargaining chip to keep Elias, to keep Mara safe from men who will want revenge.” His eyes find mine. “If you keep it, you will be haunted. You’ll sleep with monsters in your closet because they’ll knock on your door asking for favors.”

Elias moves beside us like a shadow slipping to its place. He knows both futures. He knows the calculus. “I won’t let anyone touch Mara. Not for blackmail, not as bait. If it’s down, there’s nothing to use.”

“And if I keep it,” I say, because my voice is threaded with the old hunger I was raised on. The network is a drug. Control gives you a currency that makes men stop being necessary. “Then what? Turn it into something better?”

Silas’s gaze narrows. “You think a ledger like this can be benevolent? That you will be the one to choose who gets to live and who doesn’t? That is the language of tyrants.”

I picture my hands burning, the drives reduced to molten metal. I picture lawyers, judges, mayors, cops, and the private files I have tucked in my own head stripped of leverage. I picture Elias safe and calm and quiet at the seaside with Mara and a life he’s earned in a different way.

A laugh slips out of me. “You sound like Celeste,” I say. It’s a barb, but it’s also the truest thing in the room. Celeste’s world is order and paperwork. Mine is knives and burnt edges.

Silas’s mouth quirks. “Maybe I do. Maybe I’m only human.”