Page 284 of Fractured Allegiance
Elias’s hand finds my wrist. His grip is firm but not heavy. “We do it tonight,” he says. “No bargains. No copies. We burn the racks. We take what we need to make sure we don’t die tonight, then we incinerate the rest.”
He looks at me as if he’s asking permission in the only way he knows how—by giving me the chance to refuse and risking that I won’t. I meet his look and then Silas’. Both men have been my mirrors for different reasons. Elias because he shows me what attachment looks like when it is fatal and glorious. Silas because he’s the man who chose to break his leash for me.
“You torch it,” I say finally. The truth is a splinter that slides out in words. “We burn his ledger, and we cut the scaffolding of debt that props up this city.”
Silas’s jaw tightens. “You understand the consequences?”
“I do.” I mean it. The ledger is someone else’s god. Destroying it will be my act of blasphemy. Let it stand and you hand one more God a new congregation.
Elias nods.
Silas keys into the console. He works with the mechanical patience of someone who once unpicked safes and locks. He downloads what he thinks might be useful onto a single encrypted drive and isolates it. It’s not much but it’s a start. His hands are steady but small shakes run through them like a tremor in the machinery.
When he slides the little drive across the console to me, our fingers brush. The contact is static and absurd and exacting. He watches me pick it up as if he’s trying to assess whether the metal will bite.
“You sure?” he asks.
I look at the drive like a promise and a curse. “I’m sure.”
They rig the racks to die in a way that looks almost ceremonial. Jax and two of Elias’s men bolt the cord along key support rails and set timed triggers. Mara stands by with a cooler of sand and a hose. She doesn’t argue. She’s always preferred action over speeches.
She looks tired in a way that is close to brave.
Silas takes the live console offline, one deliberate click after another. He seals nodes we can’t afford to let sing into another city across the network. The hum of the racks falters. For a moment the servers are just machines again, exposed and vulnerable.
Elias snatches a lighter from his pocket, then hands it to me like some ridiculous token of war. “You want to do the honors?” he asks.
Sometimes he forgets that honor is not a thing I collect. It’s a weapon in other hands. I take the lighter anyway. I hold it under a coil where the cord is tightest. The flame takes the cord like a tongue, and the blue line crawls, bright and hungry.
We step back. The countdown on the detonators is blunt and mechanical. “Ten seconds,” Jax says, breathless.
I think of the files. I think of the city. I think of the faces on the monitors flushed with power. I think of Mara, of Elias, of the man who chose to burn for me. One hand wraps around Silas’s fingers at my side. His palm is rough and warm, and somehow that small contact feeds something that isn’t just survival.
The cord ignites. The world gives us one long, stuttering exhale.
When the first rack goes, it screams. The fire slides through the aisles, liquid and hungry. Metal groans as it warps. Monitors implode into black teeth. Wires flare like coagulatedveins sending electric blood into the air. The smell is sulfur and hot plastic and victory in its own terrible way.
We don’t watch it burn as if it’s punishment. We watch as if we are midwives to an ending. This ledger held men’s sins like trophies. We are making a funeral pyre.
Silas squeezes my hand the tiniest fraction. He says nothing. I think he is thinking of the consequences. I am thinking of the silence that will follow. Both are heavy.
When the last rack catches, the room is a furnace. Flames climb the ceiling, licking at the vents. Smoke belts out, dark and thick, and alarms scream their own farewells. We make a quick pass, pulling drives we convinced ourselves were essential. Jax hauls two drives that could map entire money flows. Mara grabs a stack of small, burnt documents that somehow survived the heat. Elias secures the little keys and seals the rest.
At the exit, I pause and look back only once. In the wavering orange glow of the flame, the console’s monitor flickers and then dies. My name blinks briefly before the pixels go dark. For a moment everything is a cutaway, like someone has taken a gramophone needle and ripped the song from the record.
Silas slips a hand to my wrist and gives it a squeeze that means we have work to do and maybe also that he won’t leave me in the dark. He does not say, “I told you so.” He does not need to. He has said more dangerous things with his life.
Outside, Elias’ men have arranged the bodies, covered them with tarps, and sent a runner to set the perimeter for the next hours. The compound looks worse for wear, but the ledger that made men into kings and pawns is ash.
We step out into an air that seems cleaner for the first time in years. The sky is a bruise of dawn, the city distant and unaware that the scaffolding keeping its secrets has beentoppled. I should feel triumphant. Instead, I feel hollow, a notch where leverage used to be. The world will not be unmade by our flames. The men who benefit from secrecy will find other ways to do harm. They always do.
Elias watches me with an assessment that is more tender than I would accept. “You did what you had to,” he says.
I fold the small encrypted drive into the inside of my jacket. It’s not much. It might buy us a night or maybe a rumor. It might buy us enemies. Either way, it’s our last thread to hold if the world decides to unravel.
Silas slides closer and murmurs, “We’ll finish Petrov.”
I nod. “We finish us first.”
