Page 36 of Oath

Then—

Silence.

ALPHABET

Pain wasn’t just physical. Sometimes it came through clean audio. A sudden cut. A heartbeat that never got its echo.

“Bones—say something?—”

I stared at the waveform. Static. Spike. Then nothing.

I re-routed. Dumped signal through every dirty node I had cached on local infrastructure. Old towers, microwave backhauls, shadow-bandwidth riding shotgun on a grocery store’s security net.

Still nothing.

“Goddamn it?—”

The drone feed showed only black. The area where Bones had been lit up with residual infrared, but no moving shapes. No heat sig. They must have used a thermal-dampening field to extract him.

Fuck me, they were fast. Too goddamn fast.

I exhaled, leaned back in the van, and flicked through every feed we had left. Goblin leaned against my leg, his head resting on my thigh. The pressure and the presence helped me to breathe, to keep my cool. Right now, I needed to be thinking. Not reacting.

Dropping my head to Goblin’s head, I scratched him between his ears both to acknowledge him and to comfort myself. It let me take a beat, to refocus—then I saw it.

Not him.

Not Bones.

The man in the coat.

No insignia. No badge. Just presence. The camera caught a half-profile as he passed beneath a flickering exit light.

I snapped a still.

Zoomed. Cleaned. Ran it against every known-face DB I had—including ones we weren’t supposed to have.

Match:Null.

Not "unknown."

Uncatalogued.

Even the system flagged him: “Outside of available scope.”

My hands froze over the keys.

Then I did what I had to do.

Rerouted signal. End-to-end encrypted the file. Then dialed a secure number.

She answered on the second ring.

“AB?” The whisper softness of her voice was a balm. I really fucking hated what I had to do next.

“Gracie,” I said. “It’s me. You need to sit down.”

GRACE