Carolina Moon

The Ledger of the Damned: Tess

The shipyard was alive with the sound of all the wolves preparing for war. Inside the shipping-container command hub Leon had built, it was quiet. I was unaffected by the static, and I tuned out the howling, focusing on what was in front of me.

I had three monitors running. One was tracking the blue energy pulses, another was running a diagnostic on the city’s firewalls, and the third — the center screen — was a loop of Darian in that chair.

I lost track of how many times I’d watched the video now. Most people would see a video of a beaten man as a threat, but I saw it as a set of data. I ignored the blood on his teeth and the silver nitrate vats in the background. I focused on his eyes.

Darian Whitmore was many things. A narcissist, a tyrant, a man I’d like to see bankrupt. He was never “slumped” without a reason though. My brow pulled together as I watched him. I zoomed in on the video, focusing on his eyes. His blinking pattern was strange. It wasn’t frantic, like someone scared and in pain. It was… rhythmic.

I was poorer sure it wasn’t Morse code. It seemed far too complex for that. “Leon, get in here,” I called out. As Darian’s former Beta, Leon was the one person that knew Darian the best. “What’s he doing? This is a code, right?”

Leon leaned in, his hands flat on the desk as his brow furrowed. “It’s a Base-16 hexadecimal sequence.”

He pulled a notebook across the desk, and started to write: 0x4F… 0x2A… 0x99.

“This isn’t just a bypass,” Leon realized as he transcribed the code. “It’s the thermal failsafe.”

“He wants me to overheat the capacitors. He’s prepared to go down with the building if it means stopping the Grid-Keepers.”

We zoomed back out on the video, looking at every detail. In the last three seconds, right before the feed cut and started over, Darian looked directly into the camera. His left hand twitch — two fingers jerked slightly. Two minutes. That was the window I’d have between the fail-safe trigger and the total meltdown.

K.C. walked in, his presence filling the small space. He looked terrifyingly healthy now, his shoulders broad, and his eyes a constant, simmering amber. He smelled like the city again, like smoke and power.

“Look,” I dragged the notebook back towards him. “He’s giving us fail safe codes.”

He looked at the paper, then back at the looping video. I could see his muscles tense, the tightness in his shoulders. He didn’t have to tell me for me to know that he didn’t want to save Darian, even as Leon said, “We’ll have a two minute window to get him out of there.”

“If you go in to get Darian, you might not make it out in time,” I told him, my voice low.

I saw the flash in his eyes, the protective, territorial Alpha wanting to leave him. The man though, K.C., the guy who believed in doing the right things, was winning out. “We have to try,” he rasped, his voice low.

I uploaded the sequence to a remote trigger that Leon installed on my laptop. I wasn’t just observing the war, I was the one holding the detonator.

I watched K.C. as he began pulling on tactical gear. “The plant is a liability we can’t afford,” I managed, my throat feeling tight. I reiterated, “You’ll have two minutes to get him out, and then the books close for good.”

He didn’t respond with words. Instead, he pulled me against him, and he kissed me hard. It was a desperate kiss. Heat radiated from him, and I knew the wolf was lurking just beneath his skin. Then he was walking away, headed to the armored SUVs with a group of enforcers. I turned back to my screens. I had saved the city once before by turning off the grid. This time, I was going to have to burn it out completely.

I sat back down, feeling cold without the heat of K.C.’s presence.

“Leon,” I whispered, not looking away from the code. “Tell me about the Grid-Keepers. Truly. They aren’t just mercenaries, are they?”

Leon was checking the action on a sidearm, the mechanical click-slide of the metal echoing in the makeshift room. “They’re what’s left of the oversight committee, Tess. The ones who were supposed to regulate Whitmore Terra. When you crashed the system, they lost their funding, their status, and their minds. They think the only way to ‘save’ the city now is to lobotomize what’s left of the packs and run Kingsport like a clockwork machine.”

He looked at me, his eyes dark. “They don’t just want the motherboard, they want the person who can operate it.”

I turned back to the screen. I started typing, my hands moving with a clinical, detached speed. I wasn’t just setting a detonator, I was building a digital cage. If I was going to blow the plant, I had to make sure the Grid-Keepers couldn’t jump the signal to a backup relay.

Segmenting the local area network…

Isolating the industrial district’s power grid…

Hard-coding the shutdown command into the cooling fans…

“I’m layering the fail safe,” I explained. “If I only trigger the heat, they might see it coming. I’m going to feed their sensors a ‘green’ status loop. They’ll think the system is running at optimal levels while the core is actually liquefying.”

I looked at the notebook again. Darian’s hexadecimal blinks. It was a bizarre realization: the man who had tried to own me was now the one providing the data to set us both free. He knew my mind. He knew I’d catch the pattern.

Outside, the first engine roared to life. Then another. The shipyard became a chorus of steel and growls. Through the small window of the container-office, I saw the taillights of the SUVs disappearing into the fog.

My phone buzzed on the desk. It was a text from a number I didn’t recognize. No words, just a GPS coordinate. “Leon, look at this.”

He leaned over my shoulder. “That’s not the smelting plant. That’s the substation three blocks over.”

“They’re split,” I realized. “They have Darian at the plant, but the ‘brain’ of the operation is at the substation. They’re using Darian as bait. K.C. is driving into a trap.” My voice rose with the realization. “The moment he enters that building, they’re going to pulse the frequency. It won’t matter if I blow the plant — the wolves will already be turned.”

I grabbed my bag and the laptop. “Leon, we can’t stay here.”

He didn’t even hesitate. “There’s a car in the back, but Tess…if we go to the substation, there’s no pack to protect us. It’s just us.”

“Good. I’m tired of wolves trying to determine the terms of my life. It’s time to balance the books myself.”