JUDAS (BREAKING THE DEVIL'S HALO)

Wanted

CHAPTER FOUR

By the time Judas made it into the newsroom through the loading entrance on Fifth, Priya already had three tabs open on her monitor, and none of them looked like good news.

"Sit," she said, which was new. She never told anyone to sit.

He sat, the chair across from her desk unfamiliar under him despite three years of standing in that exact doorway.

"A wire story went up forty minutes ago." She turned the monitor toward him. "Unnamed sources at a major technology and pharmaceutical firm allege a coordinated cyberattack against internal systems, believed connected to two individuals currently being sought for questioning." She read it flat, professionally. "It doesn't name you yet. It names Kai."

Judas read it himself, twice. *Believed connected. Sought for questioning.* Language built to sound careful while doing exactly the opposite. He recognized the technique with an unpleasant, professional clarity, having used softer versions of it himself.

"They're getting ahead of it," he said. "Before we can publish anything, they're making sure the first story anyone reads is the one where we're the criminals."

"Yes. And it's working, and there's nothing either of us can do about that, because Apex Dynamics has apparently decided it doesn't have to function the way this is supposed to function."

She said it evenly, but Judas caught the fury underneath, banked down instead of burning, the sound of someone watching a system she'd spent her career believing in fail exactly the way she'd always feared.

"What do we do."

"We don't publish anything yet. Not one word, nothing that lets them say we're retaliating instead of reporting. We build the real story and sit on it until it's bulletproof." She rubbed her eyes. "And you go home and pack a bag, Judas. Tonight. Not because I think it'll come to that. Because I think you should be ready if it does."

"You think they'll come after me the way they went after Kai."

"I think a company willing to detain a private citizen on a civil pretext, and plant a story before anyone's even been charged, isn't a company that draws careful lines between the people it decides are problems. Go home. Pack a bag. I mean it."

She turned back to her monitor, three more tabs opening in quick succession, already moving on to whatever quiet defenses a newsroom could offer against a company with more lawyers than the paper had staff.

His apartment looked exactly the way he'd left it that morning, and somehow that made it worse. Dishes in the sink. The dying window unit still dripping into its towel.

He'd gotten as far as pulling a duffel bag out of the closet when someone knocked. Three soft raps. Through the peephole: Delia, his downstairs neighbor, the woman who fed the block's stray cats, holding a folded newspaper against her chest like something she wasn't sure she should hand over.

"You're on the internet," she said when he opened the door, not unkindly. "My granddaughter sent me a screenshot. Said your name's attached to some hacking thing."

"It's not what it sounds like."

"I didn't figure it was." She studied him a moment. "You've lived under me three years. Never once had anyone come to that door except your mother at Thanksgiving. Whatever's happening, I don't think it's the thing they're saying it is." She pressed the physical paper into his hands, ink still faintly smelling of the machine that had printed it. "I've been feeding cats on this block eleven years. You learn which animals are dangerous and which ones just look it because they're scared. Figured you'd want to see it first."

She left before he could thank her properly. The story sat below the fold, small for now, but growing. *Journalist and associate sought in connection with corporate cyber attack.* His name, spelled correctly, under a headline he hadn't written and couldn't take back.

He sat on the edge of his bed with the paper in his lap and let himself feel the vertigo of watching his own life narrated badly by someone else.

His phone rang twice more that evening, both times from numbers he didn't recognize, and he let both go to voicemail. The third call was his mother.

"Judas." Her voice already had the tightness he recognized from every serious conversation they'd had since he was a teenager. "Someone from the school called the front office today, asking for a comment about a former student accused of corporate espionage. I need you to tell me what's happening. Right now."

"I didn't do anything wrong."

"That is not what I asked you." Her voice cracked slightly, a sound he'd heard from her maybe twice in his life, both times connected to his father.

He closed his eyes. "I found out something about a company that's done something very bad, Mom. I was trying to report it. They're trying to make it look like a crime instead, before anyone can hear the real story."

A long silence. He could picture her exactly, one hand braced on the counter.

"Your father called me an hour ago," she said finally. "Told me not to panic, which is how I know it's serious, because that man does not say the word panic unless he's already halfway there himself. He said you'd handle it your own way, and that I shouldn't try to talk you out of anything, because you never listen anyway." A short, humorless laugh. "You two really are exactly alike."

"Come stay here tonight."

"I can't. If they're watching anyone, it'll be family first."

"Judas."

"I love you. I have to go."

He hung up before she could argue, hating himself a little for it.

He didn't sleep there that night. He packed light: cash from a drawer, the steno pad, two changes of clothes, and left through the side exit instead of the front.

He paused once on the back stairwell, long enough to feel something that wasn't quite sentiment, closer to a low, steady grief for a version of himself who, five days ago, believed the worst this story could cost him was a difficult phone call from a lawyer. Then he kept walking.

He ended up at a twenty-four-hour diner across the city, deliberately not his usual haunt, and sat in a booth with a coffee he didn't drink, watching the door in a way he'd never done before that night. His phone buzzed. Kai, finally, released after seven hours of questioning that had produced nothing except a clearer sense of how much Apex's legal team already knew about both of them.

kai: out. lawyer says don't talk to anyone without her present. also I need somewhere to sleep that isn't my apartment, I don't think it's safe there anymore

Judas: diner on Merrick, corner booth. come now.

kai: on my way

kai: also for the record I told you four days ago this wasn't going to stay small and I want that on the permanent record of things I was right about

Judas almost laughed, the first real almost-laugh in what felt like a very long day.

He sat alone another twenty minutes, watching a city outside the window that had no idea what had happened to either of them, understanding that whatever came next, there was no version of his old life left standing to go back to.