Chapter 18: Counting the Deck

The data smelled like dust and bad record-keeping.

Not literally—the files were digital, archived on Marcus's network in folders that hadn't been opened since their creation dates. But they had the staleness of information nobody thought was important. Weekly reports from twelve House stations across South Korea, filed by cell leaders who wrote them the way employees wrote mandatory compliance documents: quickly, minimally, with the unspoken agreement that nobody would ever read them.

Caden read them. All of them.

Two years of archives. Twenty-four months of weekly summaries from stations in Seoul, Busan, Incheon, Daegu, Gwangju, Daejeon, Sejong, Ulsan, Suwon, Changwon, Jeju, and Cheongju. Each station filed between one and four reports per week, depending on operational tempo. Some were three pages of detailed intelligence. Most were a paragraph of nothing—"no incidents, routine operations, supplies adequate."

He built a spreadsheet. Old-fashioned, manual, the kind of brute-force data organization that would have made any database engineer cringe. But Caden didn't have a database. He had a laptop, a coffee mug that Dae-ho refilled without being asked, and the stubborn patience of a poker player who'd once spent six hours tracking a single opponent's betting patterns across twelve hundred hands.

Row one: date. Row two: station. Row three: incident type. Row four: personnel involved. Row five: outcome. Row six: notes.

He filled in each row. One report at a time. One data point at a time. The arithmetic of someone trying to turn noise into signal.

---

Day one of the deep dive produced nothing but a headache and a growing respect for House station leaders who managed to keep networks alive with the operational infrastructure of a corner shop.

Day two was worse. The Daegu reports were written in a dialect-inflected Korean that Caden's reading level couldn't parse without context clues, and the Jeju station apparently considered "operational summary" to mean "three sentences about weather and a note that supplies arrived." The Busan reports were competent but redacted—whole sections blacked out, presumably by whatever local authority had reviewed them before upload.

Dae-ho appeared at his desk on day two with a plate of kimbap and a bottle of water.

"Shin says you're not eating."

"Shin's tracking my meals?"

"Shin tracks everything. It's why she's alive." Dae-ho set the plate down with the precise economy of motion that characterized everything the logistics chief did. No wasted movement, no extra gestures. He operated like a machine designed by someone who hated waste. "Eat. The rice is from the supply run this morning. Still fresh."

Caden ate. The kimbap was unremarkable—convenience store grade, which was all the restricted supply runs could manage—but Dae-ho had cut it into pieces and arranged it on a plate instead of leaving it in the plastic wrapper. A small thing. The kind of thing that turned food into a meal and turned a station under siege into something that almost felt like a home.

"You've been at that screen for eighteen hours," Dae-ho said.

"Fourteen."

"I counted eighteen. You started before I went to sleep and you were still going when I woke up."

"I slept for four hours on the cot."

"Did you?"

Caden's silence was its own answer. Dae-ho didn't push. He collected the empty coffee mug, replaced it with a full one, and walked back to his logistics station—a corner of the room dominated by supply manifests, route maps, and a whiteboard covered in his cramped handwriting that tracked every item entering and leaving Station 4.

Na-young's voice drifted from the communications alcove. She'd been moved there after her recovery—closer to Ji-soo's equipment, closer to the medical station, closer to everything that mattered in a way that let Eun-ji check on her without making it obvious. She was rebuilding her forgery operation from scratch: new encryption protocols, new templates, new procedures to replace everything that had burned with the Hapjeong safehouse.

"The lamination source is gone," she was telling Ji-soo, her voice carrying the tight frustration of someone rebuilding a life's work from memory. "My supplier in Yongsan was connected to the old safehouse. I need a new source that won't ask questions about why a twenty-six-year-old woman needs industrial lamination sheets in quantities that suggest she's either opening a copy shop or committing federal crimes."

"I know someone in Mapo," Ji-soo said. "Print shop. Owes my uncle a favor."

"Your uncle has a lot of people who owe him favors."

"My uncle ran a noraebang in Itaewon for thirty years. Everyone in Seoul either owes him a favor or a bar tab."

Normal conversation. Operational, practical, the back-and-forth of people solving problems with the tools they had. Station 4 under lockdown was quieter than Station 4 at full operations, but the quiet was productive—the silence of people working harder because the walls had gotten closer.

Caden went back to his spreadsheet. Row by row. Report by report. Looking for the dead space between the words.

---

Day three. He found the first ghost.

Busan station, fourteen months ago. A report filed by cell leader designation K-7, which Marcus's files cross-referenced to a man named Choi Sung-ho. The report mentioned, in passing, the disappearance of a thief operating under the codename "Lantern." Single sentence: *Lantern failed to report for scheduled check-in. Status unknown. No Hunt activity correlates.*

No follow-up in subsequent reports. Lantern appeared once, vanished once, and was never mentioned again.

Caden added Lantern to his list. Fifth disappearance, fourteen months ago.

He went deeper. Suwon station, sixteen months ago: a thief called "Needle" missed two consecutive check-ins. The cell leader's note was almost identical to K-7's: *No correlating Hunt activity. Status unknown.* No follow-up.

Sixth disappearance.

Changwon station, nineteen months ago: "Ash" failed to appear at a supply pickup. The report included a single additional detail that the others lacked: *Ash's safehouse inspected. Personal belongings present. No signs of struggle.* Same pattern as Moth in Sejong. Same pattern as Mirror in Gwangju. Walked out of their life and didn't come back.

Seventh.

Cheongju station, twenty-two months ago: "Compass" — different from the Daegu Compass, same codename recycled — missed an operational window. Cell leader noted: *Possible relocation without notice. Not uncommon for independent operators.*

Eighth.

The pattern was there. Buried in throwaway lines and forgotten reports, in the margins of documents nobody read because nothing about a missing low-level thief seemed worth investigating when The Hunt was burning down safehouses and the daily business of survival consumed every available hour.

Eight disappearances in twenty-two months. The four he'd already found, plus four more from deeper in the archive. All independent or semi-independent operators. All low-level. All gone without trace, without struggle, without Hunt involvement.

Caden stared at his spreadsheet. Eight rows highlighted in red. Eight names—mostly codenames, a few real ones—spread across eight cities over nearly two years.

He started a new column. Date of last confirmed activity.

Lantern: last confirmed kill, one week before disappearance.

Needle: last confirmed kill, three days before disappearance.

Ash: last confirmed supply run, five days before disappearance. But cross-referencing with Changwon station's intelligence feeds showed an awakened D-rank found dead in their home two days before that supply run. Skill missing. No suspect identified. Filed as "probable thief activity, unattributed."

Caden's hands stopped on the keyboard.

He pulled up the Changwon intelligence feed from nineteen months ago. Read it again. An awakened martial artist, [Iron Palm] D-rank, found dead in his apartment in Masan. Single wound to the chest. Clean kill. Skill gone. Changwon station had flagged it as likely thief activity but noted: *No known House-affiliated thief operating in the Masan area at this time.*

Because the thief who'd done it wasn't House-affiliated anymore. The thief who'd done it was Ash—operating under a directive that didn't come from any human organization.

Caden opened a new document. Started cross-referencing every disappearance against unexplained kills in the surrounding area. Not the broad sweep he'd been doing—targeted, specific, looking at a seventy-two-hour window after each disappearance.

The matches came fast.

Lantern disappeared from Busan fourteen months ago. Sixty-one hours later, an awakened [Thermal Regulation] C-rank was found dead in Gimhae—twenty kilometers from Busan. Skill missing. No suspect. The Busan station report called it "unrelated thief activity."

Needle disappeared from Suwon sixteen months ago. Forty-eight hours later, an awakened [Structural Reinforcement] D-rank died in Anyang—the next city over. Single wound. Skill gone. Suwon station: "Possible independent operator. Not our concern."

The old Compass in Cheongju, twenty-two months ago. Seventy hours after disappearing, an awakened healer in Chungju—thirty minutes from Cheongju—was killed. [Cellular Repair] C-rank. Clean, efficient, unattributed.

Every disappearance had a kill. Every kill happened within seventy-two hours, within fifty kilometers. Every victim was awakened, every victim lost their skill, and every kill was clean enough that the local stations wrote it off as routine thief activity.

But it wasn't routine. The thieves who should have been operating in those areas were gone. The kills were being performed by something else—something wearing the face and the skills of people who'd vanished days earlier.

Caden sat back. The station was quiet—0300, the dead hours when only the nightshift operator kept watch. Ji-soo's station hummed with its perpetual electronic drone. The medical bay's lights were dimmed. Somewhere in the ventilation system, a fan bearing that needed replacing produced a faint rhythmic clicking that [Ground Sense] had been tracking subconsciously for days.

Eight disappearances. Eight corresponding kills. Two years of data that nobody had connected because nobody had been looking at all the pieces at once.

He wasn't looking at a pattern anymore. He was looking at an operation. Systematic. Methodical. The system reclaiming thieves and deploying them—within days—as its own assets, killing targets of its own choosing across the country.

The question wasn't whether it was happening. The data was too consistent for coincidence.

The question was why. What did the system want with eight stolen skills from eight dead awakeners in eight different cities?

And the harder question—the one Caden didn't want to ask but his poker player's brain asked anyway, because poker players always calculated pot odds even when the pot was full of poison:

If the system had been doing this for two years at a rate of roughly one every ten weeks, how many more had there been before the House started keeping records?

---

He built the briefing the way Shin would want it: clean, factual, stripped of theory.

No mention of the system. No mention of Yuna's lost-time episodes or Moth's note or the word RECLAIMED. Just intelligence—raw, verifiable, drawn entirely from House records that any station leader could cross-check.

Title: *Unidentified Threat Actor — Nationwide Operational Profile*

Summary: Over the past twenty-two months, eight House-affiliated or House-adjacent skill thieves have disappeared across South Korea without evidence of Hunt involvement. Within seventy-two hours of each disappearance, an unattributed kill of an awakened individual occurred within fifty kilometers of the disappearance location. The kills share a consistent methodology: single lethal wound, precise execution, skill extracted post-mortem. No physical evidence recovered at any scene. No known thief operating in the target areas at the time of kills.

Assessment: The data suggests the existence of an unidentified individual or group with [Skill Theft] capability operating independently of both The House and The Hunt. This actor appears to target low-level thieves for elimination and subsequently kills awakened individuals in the same geographic area, suggesting a territorial or resource-acquisition motive.

Recommendation: All House stations should be alerted to this threat pattern. Station intelligence officers should review local archives for additional disappearance/kill correlations. Operational personnel should implement buddy systems and mandatory check-in protocols to detect disappearances within twenty-four hours.

He read it three times. Edited out every trace of speculation. Made sure every claim was backed by a specific report with a date, a station, and a source. The kind of document Shin could hand to any station leader in the country and say "act on this" without having to explain theories about sentient systems or cosmic puppeteers.

The briefing was a lie of omission. The truth was underneath, unprintable, and Caden knew that Shin would see the gap between what the document said and what it implied. She'd ask. He'd have to decide how much to tell her.

But the document itself was bulletproof. Intelligence, not mythology. Data, not faith.

He printed it at 0600. Shin was at her workstation already—she slept less than anyone in the station, a habit that Caden suspected predated her role as station chief and originated somewhere in the same well of determination that let her manage six cells of thieves and forgers and runners with the administrative precision of a Fortune 500 CEO.

"Got a minute?" he said.

Shin looked up from her screen. Her eyes did the thing they always did—the quick inventory, cataloguing his physical state the way a mechanic checked an engine. Dark circles, wrinkled shirt, coffee stains on the cuff. The look of a man who'd been awake for most of three days.

"Sit down before you fall down," she said. "What is it?"

He handed her the briefing. She took it, and he sat in the chair across from her desk and watched her read.

Shin read the way she did everything—completely. No skimming, no jumping ahead, no shortcuts. First page to last, every word processed and filed. Her face gave nothing away, but [Ground Sense] told a different story: the gradual shift in her weight as she leaned forward, the slight increase in the pressure of her fingers on the paper, the rigidity that entered her posture around the third page when the kill correlations started stacking up.

She finished. Set the briefing on the desk. Folded her hands.

"How confident are you in the correlations?"

"The disappearances are documented in House records. The kills are documented in the same records' intelligence feeds. The temporal and geographic proximity is verifiable. I'm not interpreting—I'm mapping."

"You're mapping a pattern that eight station leaders across the country missed."

"They missed it because each station only sees their own data. Nobody was looking at the network as a whole."

"Because nobody thought to look." Shin picked up the briefing again. Read the last page. "An unidentified threat actor with [Skill Theft] capability. That's what you're proposing."

"That's what the data shows."

"The data shows correlations. Disappearances that happen to precede kills. I can think of three alternative explanations off the top of my head."

"So can I. That's why I wrote it as an assessment, not a conclusion."

Shin's jaw worked. The grinding motion—her tell, the one she either didn't know about or didn't care to hide because nobody in Station 4 had the leverage to exploit it. She was thinking. Not about whether the data was valid—she could see that it was—but about what to do with it.

"The buddy system recommendation," she said. "That's the actionable piece."

"If we can detect a disappearance within twenty-four hours instead of seventy-two, we might be able to track what happens next. Where the corresponding kill occurs. Whether there's a pattern in the targets."

"You want to use the next disappearance as a tripwire."

"I want to not lose another thief to something we could have seen coming."

Shin set the paper down. Tapped her finger on the desk—three times, a staccato rhythm that she used when she was making a decision she'd already half-made but wanted to be sure.

"I'll send it to all stations through Marcus's priority channel. Encrypted, station-chief-eyes-only, with instructions to review local archives for additional data points." She paused. "I'll also note that the analysis was compiled by my intelligence officer."

"You don't have an intelligence officer."

"I do now." She met his eyes. The look was assessment, not warmth—Shin didn't traffic in warmth. "This is the kind of work I sidelined you to do. The fact that it produced something worth reading doesn't mean I was wrong to sideline you. It means I was right."

"I'm not arguing."

"Good. Don't." She stood. The briefing went into her locked drawer—physical security for physical documents, one of Shin's non-negotiable protocols. "Your operational status changes effective today. You're still off field work. You're still off protocol design—the locker algorithm was good, the Jamsil bug was sloppy, and I don't need good-but-sloppy. But you're back on planning and analysis, with peer review."

"Peer review by who?"

"Vera, when she's available. Dae-ho for logistics. Ji-soo for anything touching communications." Shin walked past him toward the briefing area. Stopped. "And Mercer—the peer review isn't a punishment. It's infrastructure. One pair of eyes misses Jamsil Station duplicates. Two pairs don't."

"Understood."

"Understood is what people say before they ignore instructions. I want agreement."

"I agree."

She nodded. Not the sharp Vera nod—Shin's nod was slower, more deliberate, the acknowledgment of a transaction completed to both parties' satisfaction. Then she was gone, moving toward the communications station to begin the process of alerting twelve House stations to a threat none of them had noticed.

Caden sat in the chair for a moment. The station was waking up—Dae-ho emerged from the sleeping quarters with his characteristic efficiency, already dressed, already calculating the day's supply logistics before his feet hit the floor. Ji-soo's station flickered as she ran her morning diagnostics. Na-young's keyboard started its rapid-fire rhythm from the communications alcove, the sound of a forger rebuilding her world one encrypted file at a time.

He'd been sidelined for a week. Seven days of spreadsheets and coffee and the grinding, tedious work of reading reports nobody wanted to read. And at the end of it, a document that might save the next thief who would have otherwise vanished without anyone noticing until it was too late.

Shin was right. The quiet work—the unglamorous, invisible, nobody-gets-credit work—was the work that kept people alive. Not the heist. Not the extraction. Not the clever protocol or the brilliant analysis. Just the grinding. Row by row. Report by report. The arithmetic of giving a damn.

He went back to his desk. There were more records to review, more correlations to map, more data to organize before Marcus sent the briefing to the network. And underneath it all, the question he hadn't put in the document—the question about what the system wanted with stolen skills from dead awakeners—sat in the back of his mind like a face-down card. Not playable yet. Not discardable either.

Filed for later. The way a poker player files a read on an opponent they'll face again.

---

The afternoon brought small victories and smaller frustrations.

Na-young cornered him in the kitchen alcove—a generous term for a counter with a hotplate and a mini-fridge that Dae-ho kept stocked through logistical wizardry.

"Your dead drop protocol," she said, holding a printout covered in her own annotations. "The locker algorithm. I reviewed it."

"Shin pulled me off protocol design."

"Shin asked me to peer-review your existing work. Different thing." She spread the printout on the counter. "The algorithm is sound. The collision probability is low enough for operational use. But the locker weighting system—the part where you filter for low-surveillance locations—has a flaw."

Caden looked. She'd circled a section of his implementation notes in red pen, the handwriting small and precise and slightly angry, the way Na-young wrote when she'd found something that offended her professional sensibilities.

"You weighted against CCTV presence," she said. "Good. But you didn't weight against proximity to Hunt operational zones. A locker bank in Yeongdeungpo might have zero cameras, but if it's two blocks from a known Hunt staging area, the absence of cameras doesn't matter because Hunt agents walk past it every day."

She was right. The same kind of oversight as the Jamsil duplicate—not a failure of intelligence, but a failure of scope. He'd been thinking about electronic surveillance and forgotten about human eyes.

"I can add a proximity filter," he said. "Cross-reference with Marcus's patrol data."

"Already drafted one." She pulled a second page from under the first. A modification to his algorithm, written in the pseudocode notation they both used, that added a distance-based penalty for any locker within five hundred meters of known Hunt activity. "The math is mine. The credit is yours if Shin asks. I don't need the visibility."

"Why not?"

Na-young's expression was the closest thing to contempt that her brand of quiet intensity could produce. "Because I'm a forger, Mercer. I don't exist on paper. The less anyone associates my name with anything operational, the better." She collected her printouts. "Also, you need to eat. There's ramyeon in the cabinet. Real ramyeon, not that convenience store garbage—Ji-soo's uncle sent a care package."

She left. The interaction had taken ninety seconds and included a tactical correction, a generous offer, and a dietary mandate. Classic Na-young—efficient, sharp, and kinder than she'd ever admit to being.

Caden made the ramyeon. Ate it standing up, because the kitchen alcove didn't have chairs and because standing kept his legs from cramping after three days of sitting. The noodles were good—handmade, thick, with a chili oil that hit the back of his throat and stayed there.

He updated the algorithm with Na-young's proximity filter. Ran it against the known patrol data. The results were cleaner—fewer candidate lockers, but every candidate was genuinely safe. Quality over quantity. Na-young's correction had trimmed the operational surface area without reducing the protocol's effectiveness.

Peer review. Two pairs of eyes instead of one. Shin's infrastructure, doing exactly what infrastructure was supposed to do.

He sent the updated protocol to Ji-soo for distribution. She acknowledged with a thumbs-up emoji on the internal message board—Ji-soo's entire emotional range in digital communication consisted of thumbs-up, a skull emoji for bad news, and a string of question marks for anything she didn't understand. Simple, efficient, perfectly Ji-soo.

---

By evening, the station had settled into its lockdown rhythm.

Dae-ho ran the supply logistics like clockwork—two pre-approved routes, departure at 0500 and 1400, return within three hours, no deviations. He'd streamlined the supply list to essentials only: food, water, medication, batteries, encrypted storage media. Everything else was deferred until the lockdown lifted.

Ji-soo monitored the emergency channels—the digital lifeline connecting Station 4 to the rest of the Seoul network. Under lockdown, communication was restricted to burst transmissions on rotating frequencies, a protocol designed to minimize the window of vulnerability that any electronic emission created. She managed it with the calm of someone who'd been doing this long enough to be bored by crisis.

Na-young worked. That was all she did—work, sleep for exactly five hours (timed, apparently, by an alarm on her laptop), eat when someone put food in front of her, and work again. The new forgery operation was taking shape in the communications alcove: encrypted templates, fresh lamination samples, a growing database of manufacturing defects that she studied with the obsessive focus of a painter studying light.

Vera maintained. Her role during lockdown was security—perimeter checks, equipment inspection, contingency planning. She did it the way she did everything: silently, thoroughly, without asking for acknowledgment or offering commentary. Twice a day she walked the station's physical boundary—the corridors, the exits, the ventilation access points—checking for tampering, wear, anything that had changed since the last inspection. The rest of the time she sat in her corner, maintained her gear, and read. Caden had never seen what she read. The book disappeared whenever anyone got close enough to see the cover.

This was Station 4 under siege. Not dramatic. Not heroic. Just people doing their jobs in a space that was too small and too warm and too underground, with the shared understanding that the work mattered even when it didn't feel like it.

Caden fit into it. Not comfortably—he wasn't part of the machine yet, not the way Dae-ho and Ji-soo were, not the way Na-young had become. But he occupied a space that hadn't existed a week ago: the desk in the corner, the spreadsheets on the screen, the intelligence analysis that nobody else wanted to do because intelligence analysis was boring and unrewarding and produced results that were invisible until they saved your life.

He belonged to the boring. The boring accepted him.

---

The call came at 2100.

Caden was reviewing the last batch of Ulsan station records—thin, barely useful, the product of a station that had been understaffed since its founding—when his secured phone buzzed. The phone was a stripped-down device, no GPS, no apps, no internet access. It did one thing: receive encrypted voice transmissions through Marcus's relay network.

Marcus's voice came through the speaker with the compressed quality of someone talking through three layers of routing.

"Is Shin available?"

"She stepped out twenty minutes ago. Perimeter check with Vera." Caden checked the time. "They should be back in ten."

"This can't wait ten." Marcus's voice had something in it that Caden hadn't heard before—not panic, Marcus didn't do panic. But a thickness. A weight in the consonants. "Yuna missed her check-in."

The station's ambient noise—Ji-soo's equipment hum, the ventilation fan, Na-young's distant typing—continued unchanged. Nothing in the room registered what Marcus had just said. Just Caden, standing at his desk with a phone pressed to his ear and a coldness spreading through his chest that had nothing to do with the underground temperature.

"When was she supposed to check in?"

"1500. She had a six-hour window—standard protocol, she contacts my Busan relay, relay contacts me, I confirm. The window opened at noon and closed at 1800. She didn't make contact."

"That's—" Caden checked. "Six hours overdue."

"Correct. I've pinged the Busan relay twice. They've received nothing from her. No burst transmission, no dead drop message, no secondary-channel contact. Radio silence, total and complete."

"Could be operational. She said she was tracking The Surgeon. If she's on a surveillance—"

"Yuna has never missed a check-in. Not once in nine months. She's meticulous about it. She said—and I'm quoting—'Missing a check-in is how solo operators die without anyone noticing.'" Marcus's breathing was audible through the encryption. Controlled, deliberate, the breathing of a man who managed fear by staying in motion even when the only motion available was air through his lungs. "She understood the stakes. She wouldn't go silent voluntarily."

Caden's eyes went to his spreadsheet. Eight rows highlighted in red. Eight names. Eight disappearances that preceded eight kills within seventy-two hours.

He'd just sent a briefing to twelve stations warning them about a threat that took thieves quietly, cleanly, without struggle or evidence.

And now a thief was missing.

"How long since her last confirmed contact?" he asked.

"Yesterday at 0800. She confirmed arrival in Busan and reported she'd located the clinic where the RECLAIMED kill occurred. She was going to examine the site that evening."

"Thirty-seven hours ago."

"Thirty-seven hours. Six hours past her check-in window. And before you ask—no, I don't have anyone in Busan who can do a welfare check quickly. My contacts there are business relationships, not operational assets. I can have someone at her last known location by tomorrow morning, earliest."

Tomorrow morning. Another twelve hours. Which meant the window since her last contact would stretch past forty-eight hours. The same window that, in Caden's data, preceded the kills that followed every disappearance.

"Marcus. Listen to me. I need you to get someone to that clinic tonight. Not tomorrow. Tonight."

"Friend, I just told you—"

"I know what you told me. Find a way. Call in a favor, pay someone, use whatever you have. Someone needs to physically check that clinic in the next three hours."

Silence on the line. The encryption added a faint hiss—white noise, the ghost of security.

"The briefing you sent through Shin," Marcus said. His voice had changed. Quieter. The voice of someone connecting pieces he didn't want connected. "The disappearances. The kills that follow. You think—"

"I don't think anything yet. I'm calculating odds. And the odds say that every hour we don't have eyes on her is an hour we can't get back."

More silence. Then: "I'll make calls. Three hours, you said. I'll try."

"Try hard."

"I always do, friend. That's why I look like I haven't slept." The line went dead.

Caden set the phone down. His hands were steady—the poker player's discipline, the body's trained refusal to show what the mind was screaming. He stared at his spreadsheet. Eight red rows. A ninth that he hadn't added yet because he didn't have enough data to justify it and because adding it would mean acknowledging that the pattern he'd mapped wasn't history. It was happening now. To someone he knew.

The ventilation fan clicked its broken rhythm. Ji-soo's equipment hummed. Na-young typed.

Somewhere in Busan, six hours past her check-in window, Yuna was either doing something too important to call about, or she was already gone—reclaimed, like the others, by a system that treated its tools like rental equipment and its hosts like disposable hardware.

Twenty-two percent, she'd said. The probability that everything goes wrong.

Caden stared at his phone and waited for a call that might not come.