Chapter 2: The Interrogation Begins
The garage held its breath. The only sounds were the drip from a leaky pipe in the corner and the slow, ragged draw of Sage’s breathing. She was propped on a torn vinyl car seat Jake had dragged over, a grey wool blanket around her shoulders. Her color was still bad, a waxy pallor, but her eyes were clear. Too clear. They watched Marc as he paced a short, tense path between a stack of bald tires and the workbench.
He’d changed. The torn, blood-caked suit was gone, replaced by dark jeans and a simple black t-shirt that did nothing to soften the lines of him. He looked like what he was: a man who’d just put someone back together and was already wondering if it was a mistake.
“Start talking,” he said. His voice was low, flat. “Who are you?”
“Sage Dunhill.” Her own voice was scraped raw.
“That’s a name. Not an answer. The guys in the alley weren’t muggers. That was a clean-up crew. You’re the mess.”
She adjusted her posture, a tiny shift that pulled at her stitches. A flicker of pain tightened her face. “I got mixed up in something. I took something they want back. I’m trying to get clear.”
Marc stopped pacing. He leaned against the workbench, arms crossed. The fluorescent light overhead buzzed and flickered, casting jumpy shadows. “What thing?”
“Information.”
“Vague.”
“It’s all you’re getting.”
The silence that followed was a physical thing, thick with the smell of iron and old grease.
She’s a locked box, Marc, Steven’s voice whispered, anxious. She’s trained to resist. This isn’t a conversation, it’s an interrogation she’s winning.
So we change the rules, Jake’s thought cut in, cold and practical. She’s in our house. She doesn’t get to set terms.
Marc didn’t react outwardly. He kept his eyes on Sage. “The man with the tie. He work alone?”
“He’s a facilitator. He manages assets.” She was picking her words like she was navigating a minefield.
“Assets. That’s a word for people who kill other people.” He pushed off the bench, took two steps closer. He saw her muscles coil, a subtle preparation for a blow that didn’t come. “Who does he facilitate for?”
A beat of hesitation. Too long. “I don’t know the name of the organization.”
“Organization.” Marc seized the word. “Not a company. Not a family. An organization. That’s new. Military? Private intelligence?”
She looked away, towards the dark mouth of the garage’s open service door. The city night growled outside. “It’s older than that. It’s a system. It’s in everything. Health, transport, energy. It’s the reason some people win and everyone else just… fuels the machine.”
Paranoid delusion, Steven offered, but without conviction.
Or a whistleblower in way over her head, Marc thought back. He crouched down in front of her, putting them at eye level. She met his gaze, unwavering. He saw no madness there. Just a cold, settled terror. “What did you take from them, Sage?”
“Proof.” Her jaw was tight. “Of a single transaction. A shipment. It was a key. I thought if I could get it out, I could break a piece of it. I was wrong. Now they just want the key, and me gone.”
“Where’s the key?”
“Somewhere they won’t find it.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have.”
Frustration, a hot wire, sparked in his gut. He was used to violence, to direct threats. This elliptical dance of half-truths was worse. He stood up abruptly, turning his back on her. He needed air that didn’t smell of her fear and his own impatience. “Watch her,” he said to the empty air, knowing Jake was listening from the shadows near the monitors.
He walked out into the narrow service cut. The rain had softened to a mist, hanging in the air like cobwebs. He braced his hands against the wet cinderblock wall, letting the cool dampness seep into his skin. The city’s noise was a distant wall. In his head, it was a shouting match.
She’s lying by omission, Steven insisted. That ‘organization’ could be anything from the CIA to a cult. We’re harboring a human lightning rod!
She’s got steel in her, Jake countered. She didn’t break under the needle. She won’t break because you ask nicely. She understands one language.
We are not torturing a wounded woman! Steven’s voice was shrill.
She’s not a woman, Khonshu’s ancient, dry rasp vibrated through the bones of Marc’s skull. She is a piece on a board. To understand the game, you must see the piece clearly. Sometimes… you must break it to see what’s inside.
Marc slammed a fist against the wall, the pain a bright, clarifying burst. He wasn’t Khonshu’s puppet. But he wasn’t a damn hospital charity either. People were dead in an alley because of her. More would come. To protect her, he needed to know what he was protecting her from. His methods had never been pretty.
He made a decision. It sat in his stomach like a stone.
When he walked back into the garage, the dynamic had shifted. Sage was still in the car seat, but Jake was no longer a specter in the shadows. He stood a few feet from her, his posture relaxed, almost bored. In his hands, he was casually wiping down a thin, sharp boning knife with a clean rag.
“Get anything useful?” Jake asked, not looking up from the blade.
“No.” Marc’s voice was hollow.
Sage’s eyes were fixed on the knife. The clinical calm she’d maintained began to show hairline fractures. Her breathing hitched.
“See,” Jake said, conversational, “the problem is trust. We don’t know you. You’re a story with holes in it. Stories like that get people like us killed.” He tested the edge of the blade against his thumb. “Marc wants to play fair. He’s got a soft spot for strays. I don’t.”
“I told you what I know,” Sage said, but her voice had lost its defiant edge. It was tight, reined-in.
“You told us fairy tales.” Jake finally looked at her. His eyes were flat, devoid of anger or malice. It was worse. It was pure, simple procedure. “You mentioned an organization. You got a name? A location? A symbol? Anything that isn’t a ghost story?”
She swallowed. “No.”
“Wrong answer.”
Jake moved. It wasn’t a lunge; it was an efficient step forward. He grabbed the blanket from her shoulders and tossed it aside. Before she could react, his hand was on her shoulder, pinning her back against the seat. She tried to twist, a cry of pain escaping as her stitches pulled, but she was weak, and he was immovable.
“What are you doing?” Her words were a frantic whisper.
“Establishing a new line of communication.” Jake’s voice was disturbingly calm. He hooked a finger in the torn edge of her blood-stiffened pants leg and pulled, ripping the fabric open from the knee down, exposing her thigh. The skin was pale, marked with a few old, faint scars. Training scars.
Marc stood frozen by the door, a spectator in his own skin. The part of him that was Steven was screaming, a muffled noise inside. The part that was Marc, the soldier, watched. He needed the truth. This might be the only way to get it.
“The femoral artery is right here,” Jake said, tapping the blade lightly against the inside of her thigh. The steel was cold. She jerked. “Messy. You’d bleed out in minutes, even with our friend’s fancy stitches. But see, I don’t want that. I’m just gonna make a shallow cut. A conversation starter. Every time you give me nothing, I go a little deeper. We have time.”
Sage was trembling now, a full-body shiver that had nothing to do with the cold. The defiance was gone, burned away by a primal, animal fear. She looked past Jake, her eyes locking onto Marc’s. They were wide, desperate, pleading.
“Marc,” she breathed, his name a talisman.
He saw it then. Not just a secret. Not just a problem. A person, utterly at their mercy. He saw the ghost of every person he’d ever hurt under another flag, another command. The stone in his gut turned to acid.
“Jake,” Marc said. The word cracked the air.
Jake paused, the knife point dimpling her skin. He didn’t turn. “Yeah?”
“Stop.”
For a second, nothing moved. Then Jake sighed, a sound of profound disappointment. But he lifted the knife away. He shifted as if to step back. At the last minute, he placed the knife against her thigh and dragged it anyway. She clenched her teeth as blood began to pour from the wound. “Names.” He said with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
The line he drew was a red thread, sudden and too bright against her skin. It wasn’t deep, but it was a violation. A promise of more.
Sage gasped, the sound sucked back between her teeth. Her eyes screwed shut, not against the pain, which was sharp and clean, but against the utter loss of control. Her thigh burned.
Marc moved. The distance vanished. He caught Jake’s wrist before the knife could lift away, his grip crushing. The bones ground together. “I said stop.”
“She’s playing you,” Jake snarled, his calm facade shattering into something jagged and real. His breath smelled of coffee and stale cigarettes. “You think kindness cracks this? They were gonna dump her in a landfill!”
“So we become them?” Marc’s voice was low, dangerous. A different kind of threat vibrated in the air between the two men, familiar and toxic. “We put knives to civilians in garages?”
“She’s no civilian!” Jake tried to wrench his arm free, but Marc held him, locked in a stalemate of mirrored strength. “Open your eyes! She took something from a ghost system that eats people. That key? It’s a death sentence in her pocket. For her. For us.”
Sage watched them, her hand pressed to the new cut. Blood welled through her fingers, warm and insistent. The two men arguing over her were the same man. She’d seen the fracture lines in his speech, his posture. Now she saw the chasm.
“It’s not a key,” she whispered.
The word sliced through their tension. Both heads turned to her. The garage seemed to lean in.
Marc released Jake’s wrist. Jake stepped back, flexing his hand, the knife still held loose and ready. His eyes never left her.
“What?” Marc asked.
“It’s not a physical key.” Her voice was steadier now, riding a wave of desperate clarity. The cut had unlocked something. Not cooperation, but a calculated divulgence. A misdirect, perhaps. “It’s a decryption cipher. A sequence. It unlocks one file on a private server.”
Jake let out a short, harsh laugh. “Great. A password. Even better.”
“Whose server?” Marc pressed. He knelt again, ignoring Jake, his focus entirely on her face. He pulled a clean rag from the bench and offered it. She took it, pressed it to her thigh.
“A man named Emile Gable.” She said the name like it was coated in ash. “He’s a procurement specialist. For the organization.”
“Procurement.” Marc’s mind raced, fitting the sterile term into the world of ugly ties and alleyway clean-up crews. “He buys things.”
“He acquires assets. People, materials, secrets.” She leaned her head back against the seat, exhaustion winning over adrenaline. “The file is a manifest. A list of one shipment. What was in it, where it came from, where it was going.”
“What was in it?” Jake asked, his interest pragmatic and grim.
She opened her eyes. Looked at the water-stained ceiling. “Children.”
The word hung there, sucking the oxygen from the room. The distant traffic noise, the drip of the pipe, it all faded into a silent, roaring void.
Marc felt the floor tilt. His own ghosts, old and hungry, stirred in the shadows of his mind. Khonshu’s presence became a weight, an expectant silence. The world narrowed to the woman’s pale face and the single, horrible word.
“How many?” His own voice sounded strange to him.
“Twelve.” She recited it like a statistic, but a muscle in her jaw jumped. “Aged six to twelve. Sourced from conflict zones and ‘unstable familial situations.’ Destination was a private biomedical research facility registered to a shell corporation in Delaware. The file has designations, not names. It has prices.”
Jake had gone very still. The knife in his hand was forgotten. “You stole proof of a human trafficking operation.”
“I copied it,” she corrected, a brittle correction. “I was internal security. My job was to find vulnerabilities. I found one. I tried to take it to someone who could stop it.” A dry, humorless sound escaped her. “Turns out, the someone was part of it.”
“So they sent the man with the ugly tie,” Marc finished. The puzzle pieces clicked into a picture he wished he could unsee. The professional hit made sense now. This wasn’t about theft. It was about containment.
Sage nodded, a tiny movement. “He was my superior. I didn’t know. He’s the one who gave me the security audit assignment. It was a test. I failed.”
Marc stood up. The urge to move, to hit something, was a current in his blood. He walked to the open garage door, staring out at the misty night. The city’s lights were a smear of false gold. Somewhere out there, a man named Emile Gable procured children. Somewhere, a man with a terrible tie was hunting this woman to erase a file.
He wasn’t just harboring a lightning rod. He was standing in the middle of the storm.
“The server,” he said, not turning around. “Where is it?”
“Physically? I don’t know. The access point is a rotating IP. I had a window. It’s closed now.” She shifted, wincing. “The cipher sequence is fifteen characters. Alphanumeric, symbols. I memorized it.”
“Of course you did,” Jake muttered, rubbing his wrist. He sounded almost respectful.
Marc turned back to face the garage, the decision solidifying in his core, cold and heavy as a moon-touched stone. The innocent were more than just Sage now. They were twelve ghosts with prices on their heads.
“You give us the sequence,” Marc said. “You give us everything you have on Gable, the facility, the tie. Every detail.”
“And then what?” she asked, her defiance a faint flicker. “You’re one man. With… a confusing internal landscape. They are a system.”
“Then we break the system.” Marc’s eyes found Jake’s. A silent communication passed between them—an old, weary understanding. The argument was over. The mission had changed.
Jake gave a single, slow nod. He set the knife down on the workbench with a definitive clink.
“First,” Jake said, turning to a rusted cabinet, “we clean that cut. Properly.” He pulled out a fresh gauze pad and a bottle of antiseptic. His movements were efficient, no longer menacing. “Can’t have you dying of infection. Not until we get that sequence.”
Sage watched him approach, a new wariness in her eyes. The immediate threat had morphed. The man with the knife was now the man with the bandages, and she didn’t know which was more dangerous.
Marc moved to the sink, the healing aches in his body a distant echo. He splashed cold water on his face. In the dripping reflection, he saw not just his own face, but the layers beneath it. The cabbie, the millionaire, the knight. All were focused now, aligned on a single, dark point.
“Start talking, Sage,” he said, wiping his face. “Start with the cipher.”
Sage tried to focus on Marc’s face, but the edges of the garage were softening, bleeding into a gray haze. The throbbing in her thigh where Jake had cut her was a deep, hot pulse that seemed to sync with her heartbeat. A sudden, violent chill shook her, a wave of cold erupting from her core. She felt sweat bloom across her forehead and upper lip, icy and clammy.
“The sequence,” she started, her tongue feeling thick. “It’s… Kilo, Seven, Tango…”
She trailed off. The characters, once laser-etched in her memory, slipped like oil through her fingers. She saw the manifest in her mind—the rows of designations, the prices—but the cipher to unlock it dissolved into static. A fresh surge of nausea twisted her gut, competing with the older, deeper pain of her stitches. Her vision swam, Jake’s impatient figure doubling, then merging back into one blurry shape.
“Kilo, Seven, Tango, what?” Jake’s voice cut through the fog, too loud, too close. He was kneeling in front of her again, his face a smudge of stubble and harsh angles. “Finish it.”
“I… can’t.” The admission was a physical defeat. She tried to concentrate, to claw the information back. All she grasped was the cold, the dizzying spin of the room, and the profound, terrifying blankness where the code should be. “It’s gone. Just for a second. My head…”
“Your head?” Jake’s hand shot out, fingers tangling brutally in the hair at the base of her skull. He yanked her head back, forcing her blurry gaze to the ceiling pipes. The abrupt motion sent a white-hot lance of agony through her abdomen and her leg. A small, broken sound escaped her. The cold point of the knife pressed into the soft hollow just above her collarbone, a promise of parting skin.
“It’s fifteen characters! You said you memorized it!” His anger was a live wire, sparking in the close, oily air. It was disproportionate, fueled by the lurking threat outside and the ticking clock she represented. “You expect us to buy this? After all that?”
“Jake,” Marc’s voice came, a warning from somewhere near the workbench.
“No! She’s playing! She holds onto her little leverage while she bleeds on my floor!” He leaned closer, his breath hot against her ear. The knife point bit, a pinpoint of sharper pain amidst the general misery. “Those kids are a story you made up to get us invested. A good one. Now give me the real sequence or I start cutting pieces off until I believe you.”
Tears of frustration and sheer physiological distress welled in her eyes, blurring the neon FIX IT sign into a smear of red. It wasn’t leverage. It was her shattered capacity. The walls she’d built against him, against Marc, against the whole damned world, were now walls trapping the very information she’d die to use. She would have carved the cipher into her own bones if it meant unraveling Gable’s operation. The words were just… gone.
“It’s not a story,” she slurred, the words thick. Her body was betraying her, systems overloading from blood loss and shock and adrenaline collapse. “I want… to tell you. I can’t… see it.”
“You’re lying.” He shook her by the hair, a sharp, dismissive jerk. The world tilted nauseatingly.
“Jake. Enough.” Marc was there now, his hand closing over Jake’s wrist on the knife. His grip was firm, an unmovable pressure. “Look at her.”
For a stretched second, they were locked again, a silent battle of wills communicated through straining muscle. Jake’s furious eyes flicked from Marc’s impassive mask down to Sage’s face. He saw the ashen skin, the sweat-soaked hair at her temples, the pupils wide and unfocused. He saw the shallow, rapid flutter of her pulse in her throat, just beside his blade. It wasn’t resistance. It was collapse.
“Damn it,” Jake spat, the fury draining from him, leaving something emptier. He released her hair and let Marc guide the knife away. Sage’s head dropped forward, chin to chest, as she fought just to draw air. A string of cold saliva dripped from her lip to the concrete floor.
Marc crouched, blocking Jake out. He placed two fingers against the side of her neck. Her heartbeat was a frantic, thin flutter against his fingertips. “She’s crashing. The cut was shallow but she had no blood to spare. Get the kit. The real one. And a blanket.”
Jake stood, a shadow of coiled frustration, but he moved. The clatter of a metal box followed.
“Sage.” Marc’s voice was low, devoid of the earlier command. It was just a sound in the darkness near her ear. “Listen to me. You’re going into shock. We’re going to fix that. Then you’re going to give us the cipher. Not for us. For the twelve.”
A shiver wracked her so violently her teeth chattered. Behind her closed eyes, the numbers and letters swirled in the void, maddeningly out of reach. She managed a single, shaky nod. It was all she had.
Jake returned, thrusting a thermal blanket at Marc. He’d also retrieved a small, prefilled syringe of a milky liquid. “Not a sedative. It’ll stabilize her pressure. Maybe clear the fog.”
Marc took it, efficient. He wrapped the crackling blanket around her shoulders, then swabbed a patch on her arm with rough, quick strokes. “This will help.”
The needle was a distant pinch. The cold spread up her arm, a different kind of chill that seemed to push back against the nauseating vertigo. The gray haze at the edges of her vision began to recede, slowly, like a tide going out. The throbbing in her leg and gut remained, but they solidified into distinct points of pain she could map again. The blinding, panicky static in her mind began to quiet.
She took a deeper, shuddering breath. The characters, the sequence, they were still there. Frayed, but present. She lifted her head. Marc’s face was close, watching for any sign of coherence.
Jake stood a few feet back, his arms crossed, his earlier rage now a sullen, watchful tension. He studied her like a malfunctioning engine.
“Kilo, Seven, Tango, Delta, Nine,” Sage whispered, the words a dry rustle. She forced them out, one by one, rebuilding the wall she needed to tear down. “At sign, Zero, Sierra, Pound, Victor, Three, Caret, Alpha, Zulu.”
She recited it slowly, with deliberate spaces, her eyes locked on Marc’s. He didn’t write it down. He just listened, his gaze unwavering, absorbing it.
“The facility in Delaware,” she continued, strength returning with the flow of information, a life poured out to save others. “The shell corporation is ‘Aether Continuum Holdings.’ The research is listed as ‘pediatric neuromapping.’ It’s a black site. No public records. The man with the tie is Arthur Finch. My former boss.”
Marc gave a single, slow nod. He stood up, turning the full weight of his attention to Jake. “We need an address. For Gable. For the facility.”
Jake was already moving toward a dusty laptop on a cluttered desk, his previous anger subsumed by a new, focused purpose. “On it. Aether Continuum. Arthur Finch.” He said the names like curses.
Sage sagged against the seat, the blanket tight around her. The cipher was out. Her secrets were theirs. The walls were down. Now all that was left was the storm, and the two fractured men who had decided to step into it with her. The distant clang of the forging hammer from somewhere down the alley seemed to beat a new, urgent rhythm into the night.