Page 31 of Make Them Pay

I can. That's the part I'd like to be less sure about. The archived logs are the oldest layer of the system, poorly indexed, rarely audited, exactly the kind of dead file that nobody maintains and nobody misses. I could lift eighteen months of myself out of them cleanly. Nobody who receives the package would ever know the section existed, because there'd be nothing there to know about.

There'd just be a hole where I used to be.

I sit with it. The storage unit hums. Render's breathing has settled into something slower, and one of his hands has opened on the blanket, palm up, the way it does when he's too far under to hold anything.

Thirty minutes ago I sat in this chair and decided that a nineteen-year-old girl's whole life was worth less than a complete file. I decided it because a gap is a place a lawyer crawls through, and I wasn't going to leave Serafina a gap. I said that to myself in exactly those words. Don't leave her a way out.

And now the only gap I'm considering is mine.

I go looking for a way to make it different. I try hard. Margaux is innocent and I'm not. Margaux didn't choose any of this and I chose all of it. Margaux is a bystander and I'm the reason six people are underground right now waiting for a man with a fever to come get them. Every difference I find makes it worse instead of better, because every single one of them argues that if anybody's name belongs in that file, it's mine.

That's the whole argument. It takes about ninety seconds and it loses.

I do it anyway.

I isolate the archive segment. I lift the eighteen months. I smooth the sequence numbers so the remaining entries run continuous, because a missing block is louder than a clean one, and Render taught me that too, sitting close enough that I could smell the pine on his jacket.

It takes four minutes.

I hesitated over Margaux for ten.

The package is thirty-seven pages of the most complete financial evidence anyone has ever assembled against Serafina Delacroix, and there is exactly one thing missing from it, and it's the part that would cost me something.

I close the archive. My hands aren't shaking anymore, which somehow feels worse than when they were.

Somewhere in those pages, in the section about the Channel Islands trust, is the name Margaux Delacroix. Nineteen years old. University student. Careful with her money. Guilty of nothing except having a mother who used her college fund as cover.

I made the choice. I went through the account. I finished the map. And the map is complete because I didn’t leave any gaps a lawyer could exploit.

Poe’s worth it. The team’s worth it. The evidence is worth it.

But Margaux is going to wake up one day to frozen accounts and federal agents and the discovery that the money set aside for her future was mixed with the proceeds of crimes she never knew about. And that day will happen because of choices I made at this keyboard while the only person who might’ve talked me out of it was unconscious with a fever a few feet away.

I close the laptop. I cross to the cot.

Render’s deep in the fever now. His skin radiates heat even from a short distance. His breathing has settled into a steadier rhythm. I find a clean cloth, wet it with cool water, wring it out carefully, and rest it across his forehead.

It’s a small thing. The kind of quiet care he once showed me with mint in the water and clean sheets when we had almost nothing.

“I did it,” I tell him softly. He can’t hear me. His eyes move behind closed lids, following something in the fever I can’t see. “The map is complete. When you wake up, we’ll have everything we need.”

I don’t tell him about Margaux. Not yet. When he wakes I’ll explain the choice and the weight I carried while he slept. I think he’ll understand. He’s always been the one who asks the hard questions quietly.

I sit beside the cot for a long moment, watching him. The cloth rests cool against his hot skin. His face is softer in sleep, the usual sharp control smoothed away by the fever. Dark hair damp at the temples. One hand open on the blanket.

I adjust the cloth when it starts to warm, my fingers brushing his forehead for just a second longer than necessary.

Then I go back to the table. There’s still work to finish so everything is ready when the breach begins. The timing has to be exact.

I prepare the final pieces. Package the evidence. Set the triggers.

Then I sit in the quiet storage unit and wait for Render to wake, the cloth still cool on his forehead, the clock still counting down.

13

Render

I come back in pieces.