Chapter 15 — Trace the Signal
370 Words
Marcus Liu lay unconscious on the floor, his chest rising shallow but steady. The faint chemical tang around him was already fading, leaving only the weight of silence.
Blackwell crouched, prying open Liu’s hospital badge. Inside the plastic shell wasn’t a standard chip, but a wafer-thin circuit blinking faint green.
“Locator,” he muttered. “They use him like a repeater.”
Evelyn knelt beside him, her hands trembling. “So we can… follow it?”
He glanced up at her. “We can trace it. If we’re fast.”
He clipped a small adapter onto the wafer and linked it to his tablet. Streams of data cascaded across the screen—coordinates, pings, encrypted timestamps.
“There.” He tapped the map overlay. “Signal triangulates here. Sub-Central Hub. Not on public schematics, but…” He zoomed closer. “…under the east research wing.”
Evelyn’s breath caught. “They’re inside the hospital?”
“They are the hospital,” Blackwell said grimly. “Every wire they laid, every machine they touched—leads back to this hub.”
Evelyn stared at Liu’s still body, then at her father’s fragile one. “If we sit here, they’ll just keep sending more. More Lius. More Vosses. Until they get him. Until they get me.”
Her voice shook, but her eyes were steady. “We can’t wait for Step Five. We hit them first.”
Blackwell studied her for a long moment, weighing the steel in her tone.
Finally, he nodded. “Then we cut the head off the signal. Tonight.”
He began packing—scalpel, tablet, the signal sniffer, a portable jammer that looked like a lump of metal with an antenna.
Evelyn pulled her father’s hand into hers, squeezing it. “I’ll come back,” she whispered. “I swear it.”
The monitor beeped in steady rhythm, as if answering.
She stood, squaring her shoulders. “What do you need me to do?”
Blackwell looked at her, then at the map glowing on his screen. “Be ready to go where they don’t expect. And to see things you won’t want to.”
Her reply was simple. “Then show me the way.”
- Writer
