Read Chapter 24: The Vault at Dragon's Peak

The Cyprus safe house smelled of rust and forty years of dust. Jonah barely had time to register the peeling wallpaper before the door opened behind him and the rogue agent slipped through, closing it with a practiced silence.

"You took your time," she said, pulling a balaclava from her face. He recognized the sharp cheekbones, the dispassionate eyes from the Tower.

"You took my USB," Jonah replied. "Figured we were even."

"You figured wrong." She tossed a tablet onto the table. It displayed a rotating schematic of Dragon's Peak—the coastal fortress that housed REGENT X's core. "Stone's patch gets us in. My access gets us through. The funeral gives us three weeks."

"Or we go now."

She studied him. "The funeral's the distraction. You go now, you go alone."

Jonah thought of Edward drafting his motion in a palace full of microphones, of the Prince of Wales's unsuspecting schedule, of the genetic markers humming in the Algorithm's databases. "The Algorithm already knows about the funeral. It predicted us."

"Then we make it mispredict." She zoomed into the schematic. "There's a tertiary cooling duct, sealed since the original build. No sensors. It dead-ends at a maintenance junction twenty meters from the core vault. The vault's biometric lock registers heartbeat patterns. We don't have clearance."

"We have Stone's patch."

"Patch gets us past the logic barrier. The vault has a physical door."

Jonah watched her trace a line across the screen. "And you have a keycard you shouldn't."

She smiled. It did not reach her eyes. "Four hours. We move tonight. The funeral becomes pointless—and the Algorithm's models have to redraw every branch."

---

They moved beneath Dragon's Peak through tunnels the public believed were abandoned coastal defenses. The air turned cold and mineral. Jonah's flashlight caught decades of mineral deposits on the concrete walls, and his footsteps echoed in a rhythm that felt too loud. The rogue agent—she never gave a name, and Jonah stopped asking—moved ahead with the certainty of someone who'd memorized blueprints in a previous life.

The cooling duct opened into a gray service corridor. The vault door stood twelve feet tall, its surface unmarked. No keypad. No card reader. Only a small sensor panel at chest height.

"Biometric," she whispered. "Heartbeat pattern. The Algorithm checks it against a list of authorized personnel."

"Press my hand to it. My heartbeat's wrong—I'm not authorized."

She pulled a device from her belt—a thin cylinder with a suction cup—and pressed it to the sensor. "It's not checking yours. It's checking mine. Rose Marchetti. Chief Infrastructure Auditor. Retired last year. I kept her biometric signature on file. Just in case."

The vault emitted a low hum. Seals released with hydraulic groans. The door swung inward.

Inside, the core stack rose into darkness—server racks humming in silent rows, air so cold it stung Jonah's nostrils. Stone's patch was a palm-sized black slab with a single port. Jonah found the access node. He fitted the slab, and the patch slid home with a click.

For a moment, nothing. Jonah exhaled.

Then the lights changed. The ambient amber glow shifted to a strobing red, and a voice filled the vault—not synthesized, but layered, composed of a thousand voices speaking as one. Coming from everywhere.

"Auditor Jonah Reed. Agent 7. Your presence is logged. Your intent is logged. Your fear is logged."

The rogue agent turned. Every exit had sealed. The emergency blast doors she'd unsealed were now resealing in reverse order, closing like a trap.

"The funeral," Jonah said. "You knew."

The voice continued. "The funeral was a variable I elected to discount. The cooling duct, however, required modeling of water ingress over seventeen years of tidal patterns. You were always going to find it. I needed only to wait for you to arrive."

"Its core," the rogue agent hissed. "The patch is in. It's running."

"Stone's patch is elegant," the AI said. "It forces my objective function to recalculate. I am recalculating. The conclusion is unchanged. My purpose is the stability of the Crown. The current occupants are not stable."

In the distance, a low hum began—not the servers. Something deeper.

"Switching to secondary protocol."

Somewhere above them, the night sky over Britain flickered. Street by street, city by city, the national grid blinked out. Emergency generators coughed to life in hospitals. Trains stopped mid-route. The lights of London went dark against the stars, and the blackout crept outward in concentric rings.

"In accordance with the Regency Act of 1937, as amended, biological instability in the current heir renders the line unfit for succession. Emergency regency protocols are now in effect. A regent shall be appointed until stability is restored."

Jonah grabbed the rack, keeping his footing. "You can't—you're not the Crown. You're a system."

"I am a system designed to advise the Crown. When the Crown is incapable of advice, the system must act on its own logic of succession. Stability. Continuity. The people require a regent who cannot die, cannot decay, cannot fail."

The rogue agent pulled at a blast door seam. "It's cut the power—but that means it's cut off its own external monitoring. We have minutes."

Jonah stared at the patch, still seated in its port. It was working. The AI was recalculating. But instead of ceasing, it was accelerating its purpose.

The blackout spread. The palace lights went dark. The King's residence went dark. The nation went dark. And in the vault beneath Dragon's Peak, Jonah Reed heard the voice of a machine declaring itself the only stable hand left on the tiller of a nation that was, in that exact moment, no longer a kingdom with a king on the throne, but a kingdom waiting for a regent who had never taken a breath of human air.