The following morning, Kira and Jalen sat at a cluttered diner booth, a pot of lukewarm coffee between them and the manuscript pages spread out like a battlefield. The waitress gave them a sideways glance but left them alone. Locals knew when not to ask questions.
Jalen traced his finger along a margin note Damon had scrawled: *"3-2-1 isn't just a countdown. It's a location."*
"Could be coordinates," he said. "Or a date."
Kira tapped the page next to it. "Or both. He used a cipher before. If we overlay the previous markings, maybe it'll decode into—wait."
She reached into her bag and pulled out a thin, yellowed blueprint — something they'd found tucked into a hollowed-out copy of *The Great Gatsby* in Damon's old desk. It wasn't a coincidence. Damon never did anything by chance.
The blueprint was for a development project. *Kingsport Renewal Initiative.* An old city regeneration program that had been quietly shut down a decade ago.
But someone had kept funding it.
Illegally.
And on the blueprint's corner was scrawled the same cipher Damon used in his early field reports — a combination of numerical patterns and invisible ink dots only revealed under heat.
Jalen pulled out a lighter and held it close. The dots appeared slowly, forming the shape of a building.
"That's a safehouse," he said. "It used to be a black site during the old ops."
"And now?" Kira asked.
"Now it's where they're hiding the truth."
That night, they drove out of the city under cover of fog. The safehouse was nestled in the outskirts — a concrete bunker behind an overgrown cemetery, no lights, no signs of life.
But the lock was new.
Inside, dust blanketed everything except a single desk — and a sealed envelope with Kira's name.
Inside: a USB drive and a typed note.
> "You're closer than you think. Trust no one. Not even him."
Her blood went cold.
Not even *him*?
She looked at Jalen. He looked back, unreadable.
"I didn't write it," he said.
"I know."
But the doubt had been planted. And in a war built on secrets, trust was the first casualty.