10. The Interrogation of Miriam

The ravine descended for what felt like hours, though it could not have been more than forty minutes. The path was treacherous—loose shale that shifted underfoot, sudden drop-offs that plunged into darkness, roots that snaked across the trail like tripwires. Krebs navigated it all with the unthinking ease of long familiarity, his long legs carrying him over obstacles that Adrian had to scramble across on hands and knees, the metal box banging against his ribs with every movement.

They emerged from the ravine onto a narrow mountain road, barely more than a dirt track, that wound through a forest of ancient pines. On the far side of the road, a vehicle was waiting—a battered utility truck with mud-caked tires and a cracked windshield. Krebs climbed into the driver's seat without a word, and Adrian collapsed into the passenger side, his body finally surrendering to exhaustion.

"You can sleep," Krebs said, turning the ignition. "We have two hours to the safehouse. No one will find us on these roads. The Vespark border patrol doesn't bother with this region—too remote, too many smugglers, too much trouble."

Adrian wanted to ask about Feyd, about the patrols, about what would happen next. But the words would not come. His body was shutting down, his mind retreating into a grey fog that was not quite sleep and not quite consciousness. The truck's engine rumbled beneath him, a low vibration that seemed to shake loose the thoughts he had been holding together. He closed his eyes, and the world dissolved.

He dreamed. The dreams were fragments, images that surfaced and sank like debris in a flood: Miriam Helvig's face, pale and frightened in the lamplight of The Lantern. Father Andrei's hands, folded in his lap like roots. Lena's eyes, fierce and sad, telling him that she still loved him. And beneath all of it, the numbers—3.4 billion krona, every third month, flowing through the darkness like water through a crack in a dam.

He woke to sunlight. Real sunlight, not the grey filtered glow of Meridian City's perpetual overcast, but a golden light that poured through the truck's windshield and warmed his face. They were parked in front of a stone farmhouse, its walls covered in ivy, its roof patched with mismatched tiles. Around it, the forest had given way to pastureland, rolling hills of green that stretched toward a horizon of distant mountains.

"Where are we?"

"Valley of Saint Kolya. No one knows who Kolya was, or why he became a saint, but the name stuck." Krebs was standing beside the truck, smoking a cigarette and staring at the farmhouse as if it contained a puzzle he was trying to solve. "The safehouse belongs to a friend of Elara's. She'll be here within the hour. You should eat something."

Adrian climbed out of the truck, his body protesting every movement. His clothes were still damp from the stream, his muscles stiff from the long night of running and climbing. The metal box was on the seat beside him, its waterproof bag streaked with mud but still intact. He gathered it in his arms and followed Krebs toward the farmhouse.

The interior was simple but warm—a kitchen with a wood-burning stove, a table with mismatched chairs, a window that looked out over the valley. A woman was standing at the stove, her back to the door, stirring something in a pot. She turned when they entered, and Adrian saw that she was older than he had expected—sixty, perhaps, with grey hair pulled back from a face that was weathered but kind.

"You must be the auditor," she said, her voice carrying the soft accent of the Vespark countryside. "I am Magda. Elara told me to expect you. There is soup on the stove, and bread on the table. Eat. You look like you haven't eaten in days."

Adrian sat at the table and ate. The soup was thick with vegetables and some kind of meat, and the bread was fresh, still warm from the oven. He ate until his stomach protested, then ate a little more. Krebs sat across from him, smoking another cigarette and watching him with an expression that might have been amusement or might have been something else entirely.

"You were brave last night," Krebs said. "Or stupid. It is hard to tell the difference in the dark."

"Probably stupid."

"Probably." Krebs stubbed out his cigarette and leaned back in his chair. "But brave nonetheless. The Bureau agent—Feyd—he was not bluffing. He would have shot you if he thought it would solve his problem. You talked your way out of it. That takes nerve."

Adrian set down his spoon. "What happened to Feyd? He was behind me on the trail, and then he wasn't."

"I don't know. I didn't see him leave. But men like Feyd don't disappear without a reason. Either he went back to report his failure, or he followed us and is waiting for something." Krebs glanced toward the window, his eyes scanning the hillside. "If he followed us, we will know soon enough."

The thought was unsettling, but Adrian was too tired to dwell on it. He finished his soup and pushed the bowl away, his hands still trembling slightly from the accumulated strain of the past four days. Magda took the bowl without a word and replaced it with a cup of tea, strong and black and bitter.

"Elara will explain everything when she arrives," Krebs said. "But there are things you should know before she does. The safehouse is secure, but it is not permanent. The Vespark authorities are not hostile to us—they tolerate the safehouse network because it serves their interests—but they will not protect us if the Meridian government applies pressure. You have a few days, perhaps a week, to decide what to do with your evidence. After that, you will need to move."

"Move where?"

"Anywhere. Everywhere. The evidence you're carrying is valuable, but it is also dangerous. There are people in Vespark who would sell it back to Sarkis for the right price. There are people in the international community who would bury it to preserve their relationships with the Meridian Republic. You need to find someone who will publish it, quickly, before the wrong people realize where you are."

Adrian thought of Elara Deng, who had crossed the border to meet him, who had promised to help him publish the evidence, who was now on her way to the safehouse. She was the obvious choice, but Isidore's warning echoed in his mind: She is not telling you everything. She never does.

He was still thinking about it when the door opened and Elara walked in.

She looked different than she had in the bookstore—less guarded, perhaps, or more exhausted. Her sharp features were softened by the morning light, and her dark eyes held something that might have been relief. She crossed the room and sat down across from Adrian, her hands folded on the table in front of her.

"You made it," she said. "I wasn't sure you would."

"Neither was I."

"The crash—the surveillance network going down—was that you?"

"No. It was someone who helped me. Someone who stayed behind."

Elara nodded slowly, as if this confirmed something she had already suspected. "The woman. The data architect from the Central Monitoring Bureau. Lena Voss."

Adrian felt a cold knot form in his stomach. "How do you know about her?"

"I know about everyone who has helped you. It is my job to know. When I crossed the border to meet you, I had already compiled dossiers on Miriam Helvig, Isidore, Father Andrei, and Lena Voss. I needed to know who I was dealing with, and who might compromise the operation." Elara's voice was calm, professional, the voice of a journalist explaining her methods. "Lena Voss is still alive. She escaped through the service tunnels and is hiding somewhere in the industrial district. The Bureau is searching for her, but the crash has slowed them down. For now, she is safe."

The relief that flooded through Adrian was so intense that he had to look away, blinking against the sudden sting in his eyes. Lena was alive. She had made it out of the Ministry of Information, through the tunnels, into the chaos of the darkened city. She was alive, and for the first time since he had left her in the abandoned apartment, he allowed himself to believe that she might stay that way.

"Thank you," he said.

"Don't thank me yet. There is much you don't know." Elara reached into her bag and withdrew a tablet, which she placed on the table between them. "The evidence you are carrying—the data stick, the dossier—is enough to expose the Deputy Minister and his network. But it is not enough to destroy them. The system that protects Sarkis is too resilient, too deeply embedded in the Republic's institutions. Even if we publish tomorrow, he will survive. He will blame the deductions on subordinates. He will claim that the surveillance was necessary for national security. He will frame the crash as an act of foreign sabotage, and half the country will believe him."

"Then what do we do?"

"We do not just publish the evidence. We weaponize it." Elara tapped the tablet, and a map appeared on the screen—a map of the Meridian Republic, marked with dozens of points, each one labeled with a name and a date. "These are the people who have been disappeared by the system over the past decade. The seventeen names Miriam Helvig tracked. The others in Isidore's ledger. The whistleblowers who contacted me before they were arrested. If we publish the evidence alongside their stories—if we show not just the corruption but the human cost—then the narrative changes. It is no longer about financial irregularities. It is about lives destroyed, families shattered, justice denied."

Adrian looked at the map, at the points scattered across it like stars in a dark sky. He thought of Miriam, alone in her cell. He thought of Felix Dragan, whose dossier he was now carrying, whose face he had never seen but whose meticulous handwriting had become as familiar to him as his own. He thought of the seventeen names, and the dozens beyond them, the ones Isidore had recorded in his ledger, the ones no one had recorded at all.

"There's something else," Adrian said. "Something Lena told me. The Bureau had been watching me long before I found the deductions. Their predictive algorithms flagged me as a potential dissident based on my psychological profile. They were waiting for me to do something they could use against me."

Elara's eyes widened. "You have proof of this?"

"Lena accessed my file. She saw the notation. I don't have documentation—not yet—but if we could get access to the Bureau's profiling system, we could prove that they are preemptively targeting citizens based on psychological criteria. That is a bigger story than the corruption. That is the story of how the Republic became a surveillance state."

Elara was silent for a long moment. Then she smiled—a thin, fierce expression that transformed her face. "If we can prove that, we can do more than expose Sarkis. We can challenge the entire apparatus of control. The surveillance network, the predictive algorithms, the disappearances—it is all connected. And you are right. That is the bigger story."

Krebs, who had been listening from his chair by the window, stood and walked to the table. "Before you plan your revolution, there is a more immediate problem. The Bureau agent—Feyd. He knows we crossed the border. He knows approximately where we are. He will report back to Sarkis, and Sarkis will send people after us. The safehouse is secure for now, but it will not stay that way forever."

"Then we need to move quickly," Elara said. "I have contacts at an international news agency in Geneva. They have been following the situation in Meridia for years, and they have the resources to publish a story of this magnitude. But they will not publish without verifying the evidence. We need to get the dossier to them, and we need to do it before Sarkis's people find us."

"How long will that take?"

"A few days. Perhaps a week. I can arrange a courier, but the evidence needs to be digitized first. The data stick is already digital, but the dossier is paper. We need to scan it, encrypt it, and transmit it through channels that Sarkis cannot intercept."

Adrian looked at the metal box, still sitting on the floor beside his chair. The dossier inside it was the culmination of Felix Dragan's life's work, the evidence he had died to protect. And now it was going to be reduced to data, to ones and zeroes, to a transmission that could be sent across the world in seconds.

"Start scanning," he said. "I want this finished before Feyd finds us."

They worked through the afternoon and into the evening. Magda produced a portable scanner from a locked cabinet in the farmhouse's back room, and Elara set up her tablet to process the images. Adrian fed the pages one by one into the scanner, watching as Dragan's meticulous handwriting was transformed into digital files, each one a piece of the puzzle that would bring down the Deputy Minister.

Krebs kept watch from the window, his rifle across his knees, his eyes scanning the hillside for any sign of movement. The sun set behind the mountains, and the valley filled with shadows, and the farmhouse glowed with the warm light of the wood-burning stove.

By midnight, the scanning was complete. Elara encrypted the files and transmitted them through a series of relay servers to her contacts in Geneva. The transmission took less than a minute. When it was done, she closed the tablet and looked at Adrian with something that might have been admiration.

"It's done," she said. "The evidence is in Geneva. Within a week, the story will be published. The Deputy Minister will fall. The network will be exposed. The system will be challenged."

Adrian nodded, but he felt no sense of triumph. He felt only exhaustion, and the faint, persistent ache of fear. They had won a battle, but the war was far from over. Miriam was still in custody. Lena was still in hiding. Isidore and Andrei were still being watched. And somewhere in the darkness, Janus Feyd was still hunting him.

He walked to the window and looked out at the valley, at the hills that separated Vespark from Meridia, at the border that he had crossed in the darkness. On the other side of those hills, the surveillance cameras were still dead, the city was still blind, the hunt was still on. But on this side, in the warmth of the farmhouse, with the evidence transmitted and the story in motion, he had done what he set out to do. He had brought the truth into the light.

The door opened, and Krebs stepped inside, his face unreadable. "There is someone on the road. A single vehicle, approaching slowly. No headlights."

Adrian's hand moved instinctively toward the pocket where he had kept the gun that was no longer there. Elara rose from the table, her tablet clutched against her chest. Magda moved toward the stove, her hand closing around the handle of a cast-iron pan.

They waited.

The vehicle stopped outside. A door opened, then closed. Footsteps crossed the gravel, deliberate and unhurried. A knock sounded on the door—three short raps, a pause, then two more.

Krebs looked at Adrian. "That is the signal. The one Isidore uses."

Adrian crossed the room and opened the door.

Janus Feyd stood on the threshold, his hands empty, his expression calm. Behind him, the road was dark and empty, the valley silent under the cold stars.

"We need to talk," Feyd said. "The Deputy Minister is dead. And I think I am the only person who can save you now."