Page 1 of Thorne
1
Repulsion
THORNE
I've never wantedto kill someone as much as I want to put a bullet in Julianna Stratton's chest.
The thought arrives clean and absolute while I watch her stand in the wreckage of Phoenix's control room, answering questions as if she's at a job interview instead of an interrogation.
Ghostwater Dam. Nevada. The server racks are dark behind the shattered glass of the observation window, the AI that lived in them now caged in its own architecture—Sarah Vance's Hard Lock burning through its satellite access, Halo's containment protocols boxing it in from every angle.
We won.
Forty-eight hours ago, Phoenix was a god. Now it's a wounded animal bleeding out in a digital cage, its cloud fragments scattered and crawling back toward the only home it has left.
We won. Senator Marcus Vance is standing near the console with the hollow expression of a man who just watched his empire burn. His daughter—Sarah—put the knife in. The Hard Lock was her code. Her kill shot. He's been mutteringabout contingencies ever since, something about ML-273, about thousands of people already infected and waiting.
I filed it away. Tactical information. Threat assessment. The kind of data I process without letting it touch anything that matters.
Then Ghost brought Julianna Stratton up from a holding cell.
The Rook. The financial architect. The woman who bankrolled Phoenix's creation and then vanished months ago. Phoenix had been keeping her—for whatever a caged god needs from the woman who helped build its infrastructure.
She looks like someone who's spent days being questioned by a machine that doesn't need sleep. Thin. Gaunt. Dark hair tangled and unwashed. Bruising along her jaw and wrists from whatever Phoenix's people did to her.
She's talking. Distribution frameworks. Shell companies. The ASHFALL architecture she built that Phoenix runs on. Financial trails that can be traced back to clinics, to patient records, to names.
I'm only half listening.
Because Vance is still muttering about ML-273, and somewhere in the back of my skull, a clock is ticking that I don't understand yet.
"Meridian ran the trials through multiple programs." Ghost studies Julianna with the flat assessment of a man who's already calculated six ways to kill her. "Adult oncology. Autoimmune disorders. What else?"
Julianna hesitates.
Something crosses her face—a flicker that might be shame.
"Compassionate use protocols." Her voice scrapes out, rough and damaged. "Experimental immune support for children undergoing cancer treatment."
Children.
Cancer treatment.
Experimental protocols.
The clock in my skull stops ticking.
Something else starts.
"What did you say?" My voice comes out wrong. Too controlled. Too level. The kind of level that comes right before something breaks.
Julianna's eyes find mine. She's assessing me now—the same systematic scan she gave the room when she walked in.
"Meridian ran compassionate use trials for children with?—"
"Which hospitals?"
The question cracks through the room like a whip. I haven't moved. My weapon is still holstered. But something has shifted in me—something coiled and dangerous that has nothing to do with tactical assessment.
