CHAPTER 59
We didn’t talk much after the rendezvous. We just moved — slow and methodical, like people trying not to bleed too much.
Chen stripped the safehouse like a body being cleaned after a crime. The whiteboard came down. The map got folded twice, then again, then burned. He checked the window blinds like a man counting ghosts, pausing each time before he turned away, just in case.
Lana hovered by the kitchen table, sorting through the physical copies of Aletha’s files — the ones we’d promised never to keep in print. She burned every page that didn’t have a digital twin, her fingers shaking so hard she nearly lit one sleeve by accident.
I was in charge of the drives. The backups. The redundancies. Each one got triple-scrubbed, overwritten, encrypted, and salted like we were prepar
