Chapter 6: Ledger of Small Lies
Rowan dialed Marcus Vane's number at eight in the morning, with a hand so steady that it frightened him a little, and told the calmest lie of his life.
"I'm in."
"I'm glad," Marcus said. His voice was warm, as if Rowan had accepted a dinner invitation. "What changed your mind?"
"Someone broke into my apartment last night. They took some of my father's things." Rowan paused. "I think Rourke's people did it."
"I'm not surprised," Marcus said, too quickly. "Come by Halcyon on Monday. We'll find you something useful to do."
Rowan hung up and wrote on the notepad beside him: Didn't ask what was taken.
He had spent the night awake on the floor of his wrecked apartment, thinking it through. Only someone connected to Halcyon had a reason to want the notebook. If it was anywhere, it was inside that building. And if Marcus believed Rowan was on his side, Rowan could walk through the front door.
But he would not go in alone and blind.
At ten, he took a bus to the Central precinct and asked for Detective Imani Reyes.
He remembered her from three years ago. She was the one who had sat with him in a gray interview room after the funeral and, when her lieutenant stepped out, turned a folder around on the table so he could read the margins. Then the lieutenant came back, and the folder disappeared, and six weeks later the case was closed.
She came down to the lobby with a paper cup of coffee in one hand, her curly hair tied high, wearing a brown leather jacket. She looked at him for a long moment.
"Quill," she said. "You got older."
They talked for an hour in a coffee shop across the street. Rowan told her about the drug, the crystals, the notebook, the fake detective, and the vials in his locker. He did not tell her about Cassian. He showed her the lab results and the access log.
"This isn't enough to open anything," Reyes said when he finished. "You know that."
"I know. That's why I'm going to get more."
She studied him. "You're going into Halcyon."
"Yes."
"I can't protect you in there. I can't even officially know about it."
"I'm not asking you to protect me. I'm asking you to be the person I send things to. So there's a record."
Reyes was quiet for a long time. Then she took a card out of her jacket and wrote a personal number on the back.
"Everything you send me, you also send to someone you trust," she said. "In case something happens to both of us."
That afternoon, Rowan gave Priya copies of everything on a flash drive. Then he called Cassian and told him the plan, because that was the agreement.
There was a long silence on the line.
"It's dangerous," Cassian said finally. "And I hate it."
"I know."
"I'm not going to tell you not to do it."
"I know that, too."
"Come to the terminal tomorrow. Bex has something for you."
What Bex had was a pair of silver cufflinks.
They were round and plain, each one engraved with a pattern of small waves. She dropped them into Rowan's palm in the back room of the tower, surrounded by her screens.
"Left one's just a cufflink," she said. "Right one is a microphone and a location beacon. It records all the time once it's on. Press and hold the face for three seconds, and it starts sending your position and live audio to me. I pass it on to whoever you say."
"Nobody searches cufflinks," Cassian said from the doorway.
"Exactly," Bex said. "Also, you'll look very fancy."
Cassian's bandaged arm was folded across his chest. He looked at the cufflinks in Rowan's hand, and then at Rowan.
"Use it or don't," he said. "Your call."
The next day, Rowan saw him with the woman.
He had driven the gray sedan to the terminal to return a jacket Cassian had lent him on the night of the broken window. As he turned into the parking area, he saw Cassian step out of a black car at the base of the tower. A woman got out on the other side and came around to meet him. She was in her early forties, tall, with a sharp platinum blond bob and a black blazer, and she slid her arm through Cassian's as naturally as if she had done it a thousand times. They walked toward the tower together, heads close, talking.
Rowan sat in the car with the engine running.
Not your business.
He noticed that he was gripping the steering wheel very hard. He noticed that he was annoyed. Then he noticed that he was annoyed about being annoyed, which was worse.
He got out of the car anyway.
The woman saw him first. She stopped, looked him over from head to foot, and a slow smile spread across her face.
"Oh," she said. "You must be the doctor."
"I'm a student."
"Juno Park." She held out a hand, and he shook it. Her grip was strong and dry. "I'm the one who keeps this idiot alive. Former trauma surgeon. I checked your bandage work on his arm, by the way. Very neat."
Cassian said, "Juno."
"What? I'm being nice." She turned back to Rowan. "He's been impossible since he met you. Just so you know."
Rowan felt his face grow warm. He did not know what to do with that, so he held out the jacket to Cassian, who took it without a word.
Before Rowan left, Juno walked him back to his car.
"I saw the group chat," she said. "The nickname."
"Everyone did."
"I worked in trauma bays for fifteen years. The people who stay calm when someone's bleeding out aren't cold. They're the ones who save the patient." She opened his car door for him. "Calm under fire is a skill, kid. Not a diagnosis."
Rowan drove away with the windows down, letting the cold air hit his face. At a red light, he caught himself replaying the moment Juno had said impossible since he met you, and the way Cassian had said her name, low and warning, without looking at Rowan at all.
Fine, he thought. I like him. That's very inconvenient.
The light turned green. He kept driving.
On Monday, Rowan walked into Halcyon Biotech wearing a white shirt, a gray jacket, and a pair of silver cufflinks.
The building was all white walls and clean glass, with a quiet lobby and a receptionist who already had a visitor badge printed with his name. Marcus met him personally and walked him through the upper floors. Offices. Meeting rooms. A research lab where people in white coats worked at long benches.
"Your talents are wasted on memorizing textbooks," Marcus said. "You'll help our analysts with data review. Nothing too exciting yet."
He gave Rowan a desk, a password, and a pile of files to sort.
Near the end of the day, Marcus stopped by the desk and leaned against it.
"Can I ask you something personal?" he said. "Harrow Street. Do you remember much from that night?"
He said it gently, like a concerned friend. But his eyes were fixed on Rowan's face, very still, the way Rowan himself watched patients.
"Nothing," Rowan said. "Just that it was raining."
Marcus smiled. "Probably for the best."
On Tuesday, Marcus tested him.
Rowan came back from lunch and found a thick folder on his desk that had not been there before. The label on the front read ROURKE MARITIME / SHIPPING SCHEDULES / CONFIDENTIAL. It had been placed a little too neatly, squared to the corner of the desk, the way nobody ever leaves papers by accident.
Rowan did not open it. He carried it to Marcus's assistant and said it seemed to have been delivered to the wrong desk.
An hour later, Marcus stopped by again, smiling more widely than before. "Good instincts," he said, and did not explain.
He wanted to see if I'd run to Rourke with it, Rowan thought. Or if I'd read it and ask questions. He's checking which side I'm really on.
That afternoon, he learned the rest of the building. He memorized where each camera pointed. He timed the security guard's rounds on the fourth floor: every forty minutes, with a fifteen-minute break at ten. He noticed that the cleaning crew worked from the top floor down and always left their cart in the basement stairwell until they finished.
On Wednesday night, Rowan stayed late.
At 9:40, the floor was empty. Just after ten, he took the service stairs down to the basement. His intern badge opened the stairwell door. It did not open the next one, but a cleaning cart had been left propping it open.
He pressed the right cufflink until he felt a soft click. Recording.
The basement corridor was colder than the rest of the building. At the end was a room with a large window. Inside, under dim blue safety lights, were steel tanks, glass tubing, and rows of sealed trays. A clipboard hung on the wall by the door. The top line of the log read: D-GLASS / BATCH 41.
He photographed it and kept moving.
The next room was an archive. Metal filing cabinets, all unlocked. He went through them quickly, reading tabs. Supply orders. Test results. Then a drawer labeled EARLY TRIALS.
The first folder in it had a label typed in black letters.
SUBJECT R.Q. / HARROW ST. / DOSE 1.
He opened it.
The first page was a photograph. A young man lying on a stretcher at night, soaked with rain, eyes closed, one hand wrapped in a bandage. Behind him, out of focus, the orange glow of a fire.
It was Rowan, at twenty.
Beneath the photo, in neat handwriting: Administered 10:52 p.m. Subject was a witness. Memory loss confirmed at 72 hrs. Recall of target fully suppressed. Successful.
Rowan stood very still and counted to ten.
He had not forgotten that night because of shock or grief. Someone had taken it from him. On purpose. And they had written it down like a lab result.
At ten, he started moving again. He photographed every page.
He took the elevator up one floor to the executive suite. Marcus's office was unlocked; the cleaners had been through. On the desk was a framed photograph of three men on a boat, many years ago. A younger Marcus with dark hair. A broad, gray-bearded man in the middle, laughing. And on the right, barely twenty, unsmiling, with black hair and dark eyes, Cassian. Written on the white border in faded ink: Gideon's 50th. March 14.
Behind the desk was a small wall safe with a keypad.
Rowan tried 0314.
The light turned green.
Inside were cash, passports, and a small leather book with a navy cover. He put the notebook inside his jacket, closed the safe, and wiped the keypad with his sleeve.
He was halfway down the corridor toward the stairs when he heard voices.
They came from the next office, a small conference room with a frosted glass wall. The light was on. Rowan stopped beside the glass, where he would only be a shadow.
Through the frosted panel, he could see two shapes. One was Marcus, in his pale suit. The other was younger, slimmer, with light blond hair swept back.
Theo.
Marcus held something out. Theo took it. Rowan could see its outline clearly against the light: a thin syringe with a capped needle.
"Just a small dose," Marcus said softly. "He'll forget everything that's hurting you both. And then this is all over." He paused. "Tell me, Theo. Have you ever been to the place where it happened?"