Page 47 of Travis
Chapter 12
Travis
I knew before the door was fully open.
The screens behind her were wrong. Not the feeds I’d left running, not the partitioned view I’d set up for her workstation. She was in my chair, at my station, and the data on the monitors was mine. The real data. The operational logs, the mission timestamps, the communication intercepts I’d spent ten days making sure she never saw.
She’d found all of it.
Sera sat with her hands flat on the desk and her face lit blue by the screens. Not angry. Not confused. Clear. The absolute clarity of a woman who had solved an equation and was waiting for the variable to confirm itself.
“I know what you’ve been doing,” she said. “You’re the Ghost.”
My body was still running on mission protocol. Heart rate elevated, adrenaline cycling down, the shoulder wound throbbing under my shirt where I’d been holding pressure against it since the car. Every system I had was telling me tomove, to manage, to control the situation the way I controlled every situation.
There was nothing to control.
“Sera.”
“Don’t.” She stood up from my chair. “Don’t tell me it’s not what I think. I found the gaps you carved out of my access. I found the Ghost in Kindt’s communications. I matched every disruption to your timeline. I matched your injuries to mission dates.” Her voice was steady. Controlled. The voice of an analyst presenting findings. “I am not guessing.”
I leaned against the doorframe because my legs were making a decision about how much longer they planned to hold me up. “For the record, they named me, not the other way around. I would’ve gone with something less dramatic. Maybe The Hermit. Or The Guy Who Should’ve Changed His Passwords.”
“I don’t care about the name, Travis. I care that you’ve been lying to me since the day I got here.”
Her voice cracked on the last word. Just barely, a fracture she sealed over immediately, but I heard it.
“I was trying to keep you out of it.”
“By lying to my face every morning? Heavy bag. Shelf edge in the storage room. Server rack. Every excuse you gave me, every morning you came upstairs with fresh damage and a reasonable explanation, and I believed you because I trusted you.”
That landed somewhere behind my ribs where the mission damage couldn’t reach.
I opened my mouth to respond, and what came out instead was a slow exhale through my teeth, because my shoulder had shifted against the doorframe and the pain spiked hard enough to steal whatever I’d been about to say.
Sera’s eyes dropped to my left side. “You’re bleeding.”
“It’s not bad.”
“You’re bleeding through your shirt, Travis.”
I looked down. She was right. The dark fabric had hidden it in the corridor, but under the control room lights the wet patch across my left shoulder was unmistakable. I’d been pressing my arm against it since the drive back, and the pressure had kept it manageable, but manageable was a relative term, and Sera’s definition was clearly different from mine.
She pointed at my chair. “Sit down.”
“I’m fine standing.”
“You are not fine standing. You’re bleeding through your shirt and leaning on a doorframe because your legs won’t hold you. Sit down.”
I sat. Not because she told me to. Because she was right, and my body had decided to side with her, and the chair was closer than the floor.
“Where’s your med kit?”
“Supply room. Third shelf, left side, black case.”
She left and came back with the case and set it on the desk beside me and opened it with hands that were steady. Then she looked at my shirt and at me.
“It has to come off.”
