The name hung in the air like smoke from a dying fire. Magnus Drach. Isadora had heard it before—whispered in the corridors of the Thornhill Constabulary, mentioned in passing by sources who quickly changed the subject, written in the margins of Henrik's notebooks with a question mark beside it. He was a man who had risen through the ranks with a speed that defied explanation, a man whose career had been marked by a string of high-profile convictions that had a way of silencing Valerion's critics. He was, by all accounts, untouchable.
And he had killed her father.
"Tell me," Isadora said. Her voice was steady, but she could feel something cracking inside her, a fault line that had been dormant for thirty years. "Tell me everything you remember."
Callum sat down across from her. The kitchen table between them was cluttered with files and notebooks, the debris of a conspiracy that had been accumulating for decades. He reached across and took her hand, a gesture that surprised her. His fingers were warm, the calluses rough against her palm.
"I did not remember it until the Anamnesis," he said. "It was buried deep, in a layer of memory your father had suppressed. I think he did it to protect me. If I had remembered what I saw, Drach would have killed me too."
"What did you see?"
"I was seven years old. It was a few weeks before Greywood was shut down. Your father had been acting strangely for days—nervous, distracted, jumping at small noises. I did not understand what was happening at the time, but I know now that he had decided to expose the project. He had gathered evidence—the same evidence that is in the file you found—and he was planning to take it to the Attorney General. But someone found out. Someone told Drach."
Callum paused. His eyes were distant, focused on something Isadora could not see. The memory was surfacing like a drowned object, slow and reluctant.
"One night, I could not sleep. The dormitory was cold, and Alden was sick with a fever, and I was afraid. I got up to find your father. I thought he would comfort me, the way he sometimes did. He was in his office, and the door was partly open. I could hear voices inside. Your father was arguing with someone. A man I did not recognize. The man was saying, 'You will hand over the files, Dr. Vance. You will forget what you have seen. Or you will suffer the consequences.'"
"Drach," Isadora said.
"Yes. I did not know his name then. But I saw his face. He was younger, of course, but it was the same man. The same cold eyes. The same way of standing, perfectly still, as if he was conserving energy for violence. Your father saw me in the doorway. He told me to run. I ran. But I looked back. I saw Drach strike him across the face. I saw him fall."
"And that was the last time you saw my father?"
"No. The last time was the night Greywood was shut down. Your father came to the dormitory in the middle of the night. He woke Alden and me and told us we had to leave. He took us through a tunnel that ran under the building—I think it was an old service passage. At the end, there was a car waiting. Your father put us in the back seat and told the driver to take us to a safe house. He said he would come for us when it was safe. But he never did."
Isadora closed her eyes. She could see it—her father, alone in his office at the university, the vial of neurotoxin on his desk, the note in his handwriting that spoke of despair and exhaustion. But it was not despair. It was murder. Drach had staged the suicide, had made it look like a broken man giving up on life, and the world had believed it. She had believed it.
"All these years," she said. "All these years I thought he abandoned me. I thought he chose his work over his family. I thought he—" Her voice broke. She did not finish the sentence.
"He did not abandon you," Callum said. "He gave everything to protect you. To protect all of us. He knew Drach would come for him. He knew he would not survive. But he made sure you would."
Isadora opened her eyes. The grief was still there, a hollow ache in her chest, but it was joined now by something else. A cold, clear anger. A desire for justice that was no longer abstract, no longer the stuff of novels and legal briefs, but personal and urgent and undeniable.
"Where is Drach now?"
"He is still in Thornhill. Still the chief inspector. He runs the Major Crimes Division from an office on the top floor of Constabulary headquarters. He has a reputation for being tough but fair, a cop's cop who gets results. No one knows about his connection to Valerion. No one knows what he did at Greywood. He has spent thirty years burying the evidence and eliminating anyone who got too close to the truth."
"Henrik," Isadora said. "Henrik got too close."
"Yes. Henrik Lindholm was investigating the Veritas Wing when he died. His stroke was not natural. The autopsy report noted unusual levels of a compound in his bloodstream—a compound that your father had developed at Greywood. It causes aneurysms in people with a specific genetic predisposition. Henrik had that predisposition. Drach knew about it. He had access to the compound."
Isadora felt the floor tilt. Henrik. Her Henrik. He had not abandoned her either. He had been murdered, just like her father, by the same man, for the same reason. The realization was almost too much to bear, but she forced herself to hold it, to examine it, to let it fuel the fire that was burning inside her.
"Drach is going to pay for what he did," she said. "For my father. For Henrik. For Alden. For all of them."
"Yes," Callum said. "He will. But we have to be careful. He is not just a corrupt cop. He is the head of Valerion's security apparatus. He has resources we cannot match. And he knows we are coming for him."
"How do you know that?"
"Because the men who raided your apartment—they were not Valerion's usual contractors. They were police. I recognized the tactical gear. Drach knows we have the Greywood file. He knows you are working with me. And he knows that if the contents of that file become public, his entire career will be exposed as a lie. He will do anything to stop us."
Isadora stood up. She walked to the window and looked out at the sea, gray and restless under the overcast sky. The cottage felt smaller now, less safe. Drach's reach was long, and his resources were vast. But she had something he did not. She had the truth. And she had allies.
"We need to move faster," she said. "The plan Vera outlined—getting Kruger's daughter out, getting Kruger to testify, extracting Lina from the Veritas Wing—it is all necessary. But it is not enough. We need to go after Drach directly. We need evidence that ties him to the murders."
"There may be something in Henrik's notebooks," Callum said. "Vera said she decoded them. She may have found references to Drach that she did not recognize."
Isadora turned from the window. "Where are the decoded versions?"
"Vera has them. She keeps them in her office at the Thornhill Herald. It is the one place she considers secure—the newspaper has a legal team that fights any attempt to seize journalistic materials."
"Then I need to go there. I need to read what Henrik found."
"It is too dangerous. Drach's men are watching the city. If you show your face—"
"I cannot hide in this cottage forever. None of us can. If we are going to bring Drach down, we need to take risks." She crossed the room and picked up her satchel. "I will go to the Herald. I will read the notebooks. And I will find the evidence we need."
Callum stood. "Then I am coming with you."
"No. Vera said you need to stay hidden. If Drach captures you, he will not just kill you. He will use you. He will extract everything you know about the Greywood subjects—their locations, their identities, their vulnerabilities. You are the one person he cannot afford to lose."
"I am not hiding while you walk into danger."
"You are not hiding. You are protecting the others. The twelve subjects who are still out there, living under false identities. If something happens to me, you are the only one who knows who they are. You are the only one who can warn them."
Callum was silent for a long moment. The conflict was visible on his face, the war between his instinct to protect her and his understanding that she was right. Finally, he nodded.
"There is a safe house in Lower Thornhill," he said. "A place Alden and I used after we escaped Greywood. It is an old warehouse on the docks, abandoned for years. No one knows about it except me. If you need to find me, go there. Leave a message under the loose board on the north wall. I will check it every day at noon."
Isadora memorized the address. "I will be back before you need to check it."
"You had better be."
She left the cottage an hour later, after Klem had arranged for a car to take her back to Thornhill. The driver was a taciturn man named Oskar who had worked for Klem's family for thirty years and asked no questions. He drove in silence, his eyes fixed on the winding road, while Isadora sat in the back seat and tried to prepare herself for what she was about to do.
The Thornhill Herald occupied a squat, fortress-like building in the city's old newspaper district, a neighborhood that had once been home to half a dozen competing dailies but was now dominated by the Herald alone. The other papers had folded or been absorbed, their buildings converted into condominiums or left to crumble. The Herald had survived by adapting, by investing in investigative journalism when other outlets were cutting costs, by cultivating a reputation for fearless reporting that made it indispensable to the city's civic life.
Vera Lindholm's office was on the fourth floor, a cramped space cluttered with files and newspapers and the accumulated detritus of a career spent chasing stories. She looked up when Isadora entered, her expression shifting from surprise to concern.
"You should not be here," Vera said. "Drach's men are watching the building. They have been parked outside since yesterday."
"I know. I came in through the loading dock." Isadora sat down across from Vera's desk. "I need to see the decoded notebooks. The full versions. Everything Henrik had on Drach."
Vera studied her for a moment. Then she nodded. "You know about Drach."
"Callum told me. He remembered. The Anamnesis procedure restored memories that had been suppressed since Greywood. He saw Drach threaten my father. He saw him commit the murder."
Vera was silent. She removed her glasses and rubbed her eyes, a gesture that made her look suddenly older, more tired. "Henrik suspected Drach for years. He could never prove it, but he was getting close. Too close. The notebooks contain a detailed timeline of Drach's career, connections to Valerion that go back decades, witness statements from people who have since died or disappeared. It is enough to raise serious questions. But it is not enough to convict."
"Then we need more. We need something that ties Drach directly to the murders. To my father's death. To Henrik's."
"There may be something. Henrik's last entry, dated the day before he died. He mentions a meeting with a source who claimed to have evidence of Drach's involvement in your father's death. The source was supposed to deliver the evidence to Henrik at his apartment. But Henrik died before the meeting could take place. The source was never identified. The evidence was never recovered."
"Who was the source?"
"Henrik did not name them. He was careful about that—he never wrote down the names of his sources, in case the notebooks fell into the wrong hands. But he left a clue. A reference to a location. A place called the Greywood Archive."
Isadora frowned. "I have never heard of it."
"Neither had I. I have spent years trying to figure out what Henrik meant. The obvious interpretation is that it refers to the orphanage itself—some hidden cache of documents at Greywood. But I searched the building three years ago, before it was demolished. There was nothing there."
"Could it be somewhere else? Somewhere connected to Greywood but not the orphanage itself?"
"Possibly. The orphanage was part of a larger network of Valerion facilities. There were laboratories, safe houses, storage depots. Any one of them could have been used as an archive." Vera paused. "There is one place Henrik mentioned repeatedly in his notes. A facility called the Veritas Wing."
Isadora felt a chill. "The same facility where Lina Marchetti is being held."
"Yes. Henrik believed the Veritas Wing was not just a psychiatric hospital. It was a repository. A place where Valerion stored its most dangerous secrets—the evidence it could not destroy, the witnesses it could not kill. He called it the memory palace. He believed that if you could access the Veritas Wing's records, you could expose everything Valerion had done for the past forty years."
"Then that is where we need to go. Not just to extract Lina. To find the archive."
Vera leaned back in her chair. "Getting into the Veritas Wing is nearly impossible. Getting out with a patient and a cache of documents is a fantasy. Even with Kruger's help, the security is too tight."
"There has to be a way."
"There may be. But it will require help from someone inside the police. Someone who can provide cover, create a diversion, give us enough time to get in and out." Vera met Isadora's eyes. "Klem mentioned a detective. Lena Dorner. Do you trust her?"
Isadora thought about Dorner. The sharp-eyed, weary-mannered detective who had been a source for several of her novels. Dorner had always been straight with her, always provided accurate information, always seemed to operate on a moral compass that pointed true north. But trust was a luxury in a city where Magnus Drach controlled the police.
"I think so," Isadora said. "But I will need to talk to her myself. Alone."
"Then do it. Soon. Because if Drach figures out what we are planning before we are ready, none of us will survive."
Isadora left the Herald the same way she had entered, through the loading dock, slipping past the dumpsters and the delivery trucks. The sedan with Drach's men was still parked outside the front entrance, its occupants watching the revolving door with the patience of predators. They did not see her leave.
She walked through the back streets of Thornhill, her collar turned up against the drizzle, and made her way toward the Constabulary headquarters. She needed to talk to Dorner. She needed to know if there was still someone inside the system who could be trusted. And she needed to do it before Drach realized she was back in the city.
But as she turned onto Justiciary Square, she stopped. There, parked in front of the courthouse, was a black sedan with tinted windows. And leaning against it, smoking a cigarette, was a man she recognized from the photograph in the Greywood file. Older now, his hair silver, his face lined with the marks of a life lived in the shadows of power. But unmistakable.
Magnus Drach.
He looked up as she approached. His eyes, cold and gray, met hers across the empty square. And then he smiled—a thin, predatory expression that held no warmth at all.
"Miss Vance," he said. "I have been expecting you."
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