Lena Sarova did not begin with the island. She began with the people who made the island possible.
"You think the powerful do their own dirty work," she said, her scarred hands folded in her lap like sleeping animals. "They don't. They never have. There is an entire class of people whose only function is to make problems disappear. Not solve them — disappear. The distinction matters. Solving a problem leaves evidence that the problem existed. Disappearing it means the problem never happened. The records are gone. The witnesses are gone. The memories are — restructured."
Maren sat on a wooden chair near the door, her recorder running inside her jacket pocket. She hadn't asked permission to record. She wouldn't. In fourteen months of investigating the Pelagius Group, she had learned that asking permission was a luxury afforded to journalists who covered city council meetings and restaurant openings. At the level where she now operated, consent was a negotiation conducted after the fact, if at all.
"Tell me about the fixers," Maren said.
Lena's eyes moved to the window. The afternoon light in Almathi was thick and golden, and it painted her scars in amber.
"I didn't know they were called that at first. When I arrived on Meridiane, I was twenty-one. A systems engineer. I'd graduated top of my class from the Polytechnical Institute in Valdren. I was recruited by a company called Oceanic Solutions — a marine research firm, or so I believed. The job listing described a position maintaining communications infrastructure at a remote research facility. The salary was extraordinary. The contract was for two years, with a renewal option."
"What were the terms?"
"No external communications during the posting. No personal devices. All correspondence reviewed by facility security. A nondisclosure agreement that I was told was standard for sensitive research environments." She paused. "I signed it without reading the full text. I was twenty-one and ambitious and I thought the world rewarded competence. I didn't understand yet that the world rewards compliance."
"When did you realize the facility wasn't what you'd been told?"
"The second week. The communications infrastructure I was hired to maintain wasn't for research. It was a surveillance system — inward-facing, monitoring every room, every conversation, every interaction on the island. And it was also outward-facing, intercepting satellite communications, financial transmissions, diplomatic traffic from at least nine countries."
"You were maintaining a spy facility."
"I was maintaining a leverage factory. The island's primary function wasn't intelligence collection for any government. It was intelligence collection for the consortium — the network that Voss had built. Every secret that passed through those systems was catalogued, cross-referenced, and stored. Not for immediate use. For future use. The consortium's power didn't come from what it knew today. It came from what it could reveal tomorrow."
Maren absorbed this in silence. The architecture was becoming clearer — and more terrifying. Not a single blackmail operation but a permanent, self-sustaining infrastructure of compromise. A machine that manufactured leverage the way a factory manufactures widgets — continuously, efficiently, at industrial scale.
"Who else was on the island?" she asked.
"Staff. Thirty to forty people at any given time, rotating on six-month contracts. Engineers, security personnel, domestic workers, medical staff. And then there were the visitors."
"Who visited?"
"I didn't always know. The visitor compound was separate from the staff quarters. We were told explicitly that interaction with visitors was prohibited. But I maintained the surveillance systems, which meant I had access to the monitoring feeds. Not officially — I'd built a backdoor into the system during my first month, because I'd started to understand that the only protection I had was information."
"What did you see?"
Lena's hands tightened in her lap. The scar tissue whitened.
"I saw people who appeared on television. Who appeared in newspapers. Who appeared in the halls of power in countries I'd grown up respecting. And I saw them doing things that — " She stopped. Breathed. Controlled herself with visible effort. "I saw them being recorded doing things that would destroy them. And they knew they were being recorded. That was the point. The recording was the price of admission. Once you were on camera, you were inside the web. You couldn't leave without destroying yourself."
"Mutual entanglement," Maren said.
"Yes. Except it wasn't mutual. Voss held the recordings. The visitors held nothing. The mutuality was an illusion — a comfort story told to people who needed to believe they had some power in the arrangement. They didn't. Voss did. And the consortium did. And people like me — people who maintained the machinery — we had nothing at all."
Two thousand kilometers to the southwest, the Nereid cut through calm seas toward a coordinate set that appeared on no chart. Tomás stood at the bow, watching the horizon with the particular vigilance of a man who had spent years scanning for threats and had never once failed to find them.
GRENADINE had retired to her cabin after their conversation, leaving Tomás alone with the crew — four men who moved with the synchronized efficiency of military training and spoke to no one, including each other. They were operatives of some kind, though from which organization or nation, Tomás couldn't determine. In the consortium's world, national affiliation was a costume worn and discarded as needed.
He thought about the fixers.
He had been one. Not in the crude sense — he'd never killed anyone, never disposed of a body, never stood in a room and watched someone's life end. His role had been more refined and, he now understood, more corrosive. He had been a systems fixer — the person who ensured that the machinery of concealment operated smoothly, that the security protocols held, that the digital architecture of secrecy remained impenetrable.
When a scandal threatened to breach the consortium's perimeter, Tomás was not the one who silenced the witness. He was the one who ensured there was no evidence the witness had ever existed. He scrubbed databases. He rerouted communications. He modified access logs. He was the man who made the digital world agree with the consortium's preferred version of reality.
And he had been very, very good at it.
The first time he'd understood the full implications of his work was in 2017, during an incident he still thought of as the Kessler Affair — though "affair" was a grotesquely inadequate word for what had happened.
Anton Kessler was a Veltheni industrialist who had visited Meridiane three times. During his third visit, something had gone wrong — a staff member had seen something she shouldn't have, had managed to send a partial message through a communication channel Tomás hadn't known existed, and the message had reached a journalist in Valdren.
Tomás was dispatched to contain the situation. Not to harm anyone — that was someone else's department — but to erase the digital trail. The message. The communication channel. The staff member's employment records. The journalist's source files.
He'd done it in sixteen hours. Flawlessly. Completely.
Three days later, the staff member was reported to have left the island voluntarily. The journalist published nothing. Anton Kessler attended a charity gala in Haldensfeld and was photographed shaking hands with the Veltheni prime minister.
Tomás had not asked what happened to the staff member. He had not needed to. The absence of a question was, in the consortium's economy, a form of currency — a demonstration of reliability, of discretion, of the willingness to not know what knowing would make intolerable.
He had been paid well for his ignorance. A villa in Almathi. A boat. Accounts in three jurisdictions. And the slow, cumulative poisoning of his conscience, which he'd managed to suppress until the night he'd walked into the wrong room on Meridiane and seen something that his mind still refused to fully render.
That was when he'd started planning his exit.
That was when he'd realized there was no exit.
"The fixers weren't just on the island," Lena continued. Her voice had acquired a rhythmic quality, as though she were reciting testimony she'd rehearsed in the dark for years. "They were everywhere. Every city where the consortium operated — and it operated everywhere — there were people whose job was to make truth disappear."
"How?" Maren asked.
"Different methods for different problems. A financial scandal? The fixer restructures the relevant companies, moves the funds through enough jurisdictions to break the chain of evidence, and ensures that any regulatory inquiry is handled by officials who are themselves inside the web. A legal problem? The fixer identifies the judge, the prosecutor, the investigating officer, and determines which of them can be compromised, redirected, or replaced. A media problem? The fixer buys the publication, or the journalist, or — if neither is possible — generates enough counter-narrative to drown the truth in noise."
"And if the problem is a person?"
Lena looked at Maren directly. The gold light was gone from the window now, replaced by the gray of approaching evening. Her eyes were very still.
"Then the fixer makes the person not a problem anymore."
"Kills them?"
"Sometimes. But that's crude. It attracts attention. The preferred method is what they call social decommissioning. You don't kill the person. You kill their credibility. Their career. Their relationships. Their mental health. You make them so damaged, so discredited, so isolated that nothing they say will ever be believed. And then, when they're broken, you offer them a choice: silence and a modest pension, or continued destruction. Most people choose silence. The ones who don't—"
She held up her hands. The scars caught the gray light.
"The ones who don't learn that there are things worse than being silenced."
Maren's chest was tight. Not from fear — from recognition. She had seen this machinery in operation. She had watched it work on Kristof Deniel, who had been stripped of his career and his reputation for asking a single question about an island that didn't exist. She had seen it work on three other sources who had provided information for her Pelagius investigation — one fired, one divorced, one hospitalized for a "breakdown" that conveniently coincided with his scheduled testimony before a parliamentary committee.
The fixers didn't need to be violent. Violence was a failure mode — an admission that the softer tools of destruction had proven insufficient. The real art was in the invisible demolition of a human being, conducted so gradually and so thoroughly that even the victim eventually questioned whether their destruction was self-inflicted.
"How many fixers does the consortium employ?" Maren asked.
"I don't know the total number. On Meridiane, I had access to communications logs that referenced at least forty individuals operating in what they called the Tidal Group — the consortium's dedicated containment unit. But the Tidal Group was just the core. Beyond them, there were rings of contractors, specialists, freelancers — people who performed individual tasks without understanding the larger operation. A lawyer who files a particular motion. An accountant who restructures a particular company. A therapist who diagnoses a particular patient with a particular condition. None of them know they're working for the consortium. They think they're doing their jobs."
"And the Tidal Group coordinates all of this?"
"The Tidal Group coordinates everything. Every scandal that disappears, every investigation that stalls, every witness who recants, every journalist who suddenly loses interest in a story — the Tidal Group's fingerprints are on it. Not visibly. Never visibly. They operate through intermediaries, through institutions, through the natural friction of bureaucracy and human weakness. They don't need to break the system. They just need to steer it."
On the Nereid, Tomás descended to the lower deck and stood outside GRENADINE's cabin. He could hear her speaking — low, rapid, in a language he couldn't identify. He waited until the conversation ended, then knocked.
"Come."
He entered. She was seated at a small desk, her tablet dark, her expression unreadable.
"I want to know something," he said.
"That's a dangerous habit."
"The third biometric key for the Meridiane archive. You said it's the reason we're in a hurry. Who is it?"
GRENADINE regarded him for a long moment. He could feel her calculating — not whether to tell him, but how much of the truth would serve her purposes.
"Her name is Lena Sarova. Former systems engineer on Meridiane. She disappeared from the island in 2019, during the decommission. We assumed she was dead. Six months ago, we received intelligence that she's alive and in Almathi."
"And she has biometric access to the archive?"
"Voss added her without the consortium's knowledge. We discovered this only after his death, when we analyzed the access protocols on the Archen servers. He gave her clearance — fingerprint, retinal, and voiceprint — and he did it in 2018, a year before the island was shut down."
"Why would he give access to a staff engineer?"
"Because she wasn't just a staff engineer, Tomás. She was his contingency. His dead man's switch in human form. If anything happened to him, she could access the complete archive — including the entries that document the consortium's own internal crimes."
The ship creaked around them. The ocean pressed against the hull.
"She's a weapon," Tomás said.
"She's a bomb," GRENADINE corrected. "And someone is trying to light the fuse."
She opened her tablet and showed him a screenshot — a text message, intercepted from a burner phone network in Almathi.
THE ISLAND IS REAL. SOMEONE SURVIVED IT. ALMATHI PORT DISTRICT. THE WOMAN WITH THE BURNED HANDS. FIND HER BEFORE THEY DO.
"Who sent this?" Tomás asked.
"We don't know. But it was sent to a journalist in Verentaal named Maren Althaus. She's been investigating Pelagius for over a year. She's persistent, she's intelligent, and she's currently on her way to Almathi."
Tomás stared at the message. The journalist. The survivor. The archive. Three threads converging on a single point.
"Someone is orchestrating this," he said.
"Yes."
"Someone inside the consortium?"
GRENADINE closed her tablet.
"Someone who wants the consortium to burn. And they're using us — all of us — as the accelerant."
In the boarding house, Maren leaned forward.
"Lena. The men who came asking about you yesterday. Did you see them?"
"No. The boy at the electronics stall warned me. I stayed in my room."
"They'll come back."
"I know."
"I can help you. But I need to understand — do you have evidence? Physical evidence? Files, recordings, anything?"
Lena Sarova looked at her scarred hands. She turned them over slowly, studying the ruined landscape of her own skin as though reading a language only she could understand.
"I don't have files," she said. "I have something better."
"What?"
"I have the key to all of them."
She pressed her fingertips together. The burned ridges aligned into patterns that were not random — not the natural chaos of fire damage but something deliberate, something preserved beneath the destruction.
"They burned my hands to destroy my fingerprints," she said. "But Voss used a subdermal biometric implant. The scanner doesn't read the surface. It reads what's underneath."
She looked up at Maren with eyes that held three years of darkness and a single, burning point of light.
"They can burn my skin. They can't burn what he put inside me."