Director Borin rose from his chair, a clear signal that the monumental debriefing was over. He walked to the armored window of his office, looking out at the city below as if seeing it for the first time, a fragile collection of lights against an encroaching, cosmic darkness. "You are all dismissed," he said, his back to them. "Rest. Recover. A new strategy will need to be formulated. It will take time."
Zara and Ronan nodded, turning to leave, the weight of their new reality pressing down on them. But Liam did not move.
"Director," he said, his voice quiet but firm. "There is one more thing."
Borin turned slowly, his expression a mixture of weariness and curiosity. "What else could there possibly be, Seeker?"
The atmosphere in the room, which had been filled with the awe and terror of cosmic revelations, suddenly shifted, becoming intensely personal, charged with a grief that had been held in check for years.
"My brother," Liam began, his voice perfectly steady, but his eyes burning with a cold, clear fire. "His death was not an accident."
He stepped forward, placing his datapad on Borin's desk. He didn't speak of his own subjective, psychic visions. He presented the evidence with the cold, hard precision of the historian he once was. "I re-examined my own memory of the event, not as a victim, but as a Seeker. The details I was too young and too traumatized to understand at the time are now… clear."
He laid it all out. The black, unmarked sedan. The driver's face, a featureless blank that his memory had recorded not as a blur, but as a *distortion*. The impossible flicker of manipulated probability just before the car appeared. And the final, damning piece of evidence: the faint, almost subliminal image of the Blank Page Legion's symbol on the car's trunk, an image he had seen but never comprehended until now.
"It was a targeted assassination," Liam concluded, his voice dropping to a near-whisper, yet each word was filled with the unshakable certainty of a proven theorem. "And it was carried out by the Legion. Or, at least, by a faction using their sigil."
A stunned, absolute silence fell over the office. Zara, who had been halfway to the door, froze, her hand on the handle. Ronan stopped beside her, his face a mask of shock and dawning horror. They had known Liam's past was tragic; they had never imagined it was malicious. They were not just fighting a war for the world; they were now in a war that had, from the very beginning, been a personal vendetta.
Borin's face, which had remained a stoic mask throughout the discussion of cosmic gods and dying realities, finally, truly, broke. The change was subtle, a tightening of the jaw, a flicker of profound, ancient pain in his eyes. He slowly walked back to his desk, his movements heavy. He sat down and touched a small, framed photograph on the corner of his desk. It was a picture of a group of smiling, younger Pact agents. Among them was a confident, bright-eyed young man who looked unmistakably like an older version of Liam.
"I was his handler," Borin said, his voice a low, gravelly rasp thick with a regret he had buried for years. "Your brother… he was one of the best. Brave, brilliant, and reckless." He looked up at Liam. "There were… anomalies in the official report. Inconsistencies. A lack of skid marks on the road. A traffic camera that malfunctioned for exactly ninety seconds. At the time, they were dismissed as statistical noise. We treated it as a tragedy." His fists clenched. "It seems we should have treated it as an attack."
The admission was a profound one. It was an acknowledgment of a failure that had festered at the heart of the Pact, and at the heart of Liam's life, for years.
"I need to know why," Liam said, his voice shaking with a controlled, cold fury. "Was he a target? Was my family? Was I? I am done searching for answers in the ghosts of strangers. Now, I need to find the ghosts in my own house."
He looked Borin directly in the eye. "I need access. To the archives. To the original case file. To all of it. Unredacted."
This was more than a request. It was a demand. For a moment, the Director of the Iron Pact faced the Seeker, and the hierarchical lines that defined their relationship blurred.
Borin held his gaze, and in Liam's eyes, he saw not a subordinate asking for permission, but an unstoppable force that had just been given a direction. He gave a slow, solemn nod.
"You shall have it," he said. He turned to his terminal and, with a few keystrokes, authorized a high-level data transfer. "The original case file for the death of Agent Daniel Vesper. Codename: 'Broken Echo'. It is now yours. I am reclassifying it from a closed, cold case to an active investigation, under your direct authority." He looked at Zara and Ronan. "Your team's next official mission."
The air crackled with the finality of the decision. Liam's personal quest for justice and the team's ongoing war against the forces of erasure were now officially, inextricably, one and the same.
Later that night, in the quiet of their new safe house, the three of them were gathered around the main console. The encrypted file from Borin was displayed on the holographic screen.
Zara placed a reassuring hand on Liam's shoulder. "You don't have to do this alone," she said softly.
"We're with you," Ronan added, his voice serious. "To the end of the line."
Liam looked at his friends, his family, a profound sense of gratitude momentarily eclipsing his burning anger. He nodded, and with a deep breath, he opened the file.
The first document to appear was a heavily redacted incident report. The second was a series of crime scene photos. The first image was a grainy, black-and-white shot of a familiar street corner, a place forever burned into his memory.
He was no longer just a soldier in a cosmic war. He was a son and a brother, seeking justice for a crime that had shaped his entire existence. And he would tear down the world to find the truth.