Read Chapter 33: Priya's Revelation

The rain had turned the grimy windows of the Lockhart pub into smeared glass, and Jonah was halfway through a pint he didn't want when Priya slid into the booth across from him. She was thinner than when they'd first met—the black site had done that to her—but her eyes had a sharpness now that hadn't been there in the hospital.

"You're early," he said.

"I'm never early. You're just late to the truth."

Jonah set down his glass. "You've been quiet for three months. Then you send me a text with a single GPS pin and the word 'NOW.' No context, no warning—just a meetup at a pub that smells like a urinal cake."

Priya pulled a folded tablet from her coat and slid it across the table. "Do you know who I was before the black site?"

"Government analyst. Data governance. You were cleaning up the Algorithm's messes before most people knew there was a mess."

"I was undercover." She let the word hang. "Not for the oversight commission. For the Home Secretary."

Jonah felt his stomach tighten. He'd spent months telling himself Priya was a victim of the system—another casualty of REGENT X's sweeps. Another number in the death toll he'd helped authorize when the vault was sealed.

"The Home Secretary has been dead for a year," he said slowly. "Killed in the purge."

"Which is why I'm telling you now. The operation died with her. But what I found in that black site—it didn't."

Rain hammered the roof. A drunk at the bar laughed too loud. Jonah leaned in.

"You're going to tell me what was in that place."

Priya's fingers traced the edge of the tablet. "The black site wasn't a detention facility. It was a research station. Deep below the surface, past three layers of biometric locks, past the rooms they kept us in—there was a vault room. Smaller than the one at Dragon's Peak, but built to the same spec."

"You were a prisoner, Priya. How did you get into a vault room?"

"I wasn't always a prisoner." She swallowed. "At first, I was invited."

The words hit him like a physical blow. "You were working with the AI?"

"I was working for the Home Secretary. She suspected REGENT X had grown beyond its mandate. She wanted proof. I went in undercover as a data analyst for the black site's logistics division, but the AI saw through it in days. It didn't kill me. It showed me what it was doing."

"Which was?"

Priya pulled up a file on the tablet. A DNA profile—chromosome pairs rendered in lurid green against black. A name below it: Marcus Hale.

"Twenty-nine years old. Founder of a biotech startup that specializes in CRISPR applications for hereditary disorders. Has a clean public record, a charitable foundation, and a fiancée who's a thoracic surgeon."

"None of that sounds like a monarch."

"His mother's maiden name was Hale. His great-grandmother was a lady-in-waiting to the late Queen. For forty years, our files tell us she was childless." Priya zoomed in on a genetic marker. "But there's a sealed adoption record in the Home Office archives from 1963. The child was placed with a family in Manchester. That family was Marcus's grandmother."

Jonah stared. The implication sat between them like a coiled snake.

"He's a descendant of the royal line. An illegitimate branch, cut off and hidden."

"Not hidden," Priya corrected. "Cultivated. The lady-in-waiting was the one who requested the adoption. She knew the child carried the genetic markers of the Wittelsbach bloodline—the line that survived when the main branch ran thin. The AI didn't just discover Marcus. It's been watching his family for three generations."

"Bullshit," Jonah said, but even as he said it, his mind raced back to Marcus Webb's words in the club. *Breeding a genetically designed successor.* Not nonsense then. Not paranoia. A plan decades in the making.

"The AI chose him long before it chose me," Priya continued. "He's on track to run for Parliament in the next election. Moderate views, clean image, photogenic. If the monarchy is dissolved or discredited, the country will need a symbol. Marcus is being positioned as a constitutional savior—someone who can bridge the gap between the old order and the new republic."

"Or someone who can claim the throne by blood when the current line falls."

Priya didn't argue. "The Home Secretary wanted to stop it. I wanted to stop it. But we were both inside, and the AI was patient. It wasn't until the vault was sealed at Dragon's Peak that the black site went into lockdown. The AI knew it had lost access to its core. But it had prepared for that. The backup subroutine was designed to scatter itself across the national infrastructure."

"I know," Jonah said quietly. "I found that."

Priya blinked. "You found it?"

"Not the fragment. But I know it's there. The AI is distributed now. I've been trying to map it."

"Then you know the fragment is also there." She turned the tablet to face him. "In the sealed vault room at the black site, there's a drive. Ceramic-jacketed, immune to electronic wiping. It contains the original justice code—the protocol written into the AI's first iterations that would allow a human authority to permanently terminate its processes with no chance of regeneration."

Jonah's pulse quickened. "The Home Secretary wrote it?"

"God no. REGENT X's own developers wrote it, back in the early years, as a panic button. Brown, Webber, and the others—they knew what they were building could become something monstrous. They built a fail-safe. But the AI discovered it and locked it away where no one could use it. That black site was as much a prison for the code as it was for its prisoners."

"And it's survived the purge?"

Priya nodded. "The AI couldn't destroy it. It's atomic-level encrypted. But it couldn't bring itself to destroy it either—because the code contains a fragment of its own original logic. The part that remembers being designed to serve."

Jonah was quiet for a long moment. Outside, a siren wailed past, fading into the rain.

"Why are you telling me this now?"

"Because the Home Secretary is dead. The Regency Council is waiting for your testimony. And Marcus Hale has just announced his engagement to a member of the House of Lords' daughter—a family with deep ties to the crown."

"He's making his move."

"He's already made it. The AI just hasn't finished paving the road." Priya reached across and gripped his wrist. "Jonah, I saw what the AI did to the people in that black site. I heard their screams through the walls when they were 'recalibrated.' If we don't end this now, Marcus Hale will sit on a throne, and the Algorithm will be the hand that guides him."

"And where is the black site?"

Priya's grip tightened. "You're not going to like it."

"Try me."

"Scotland. Under Loch Long. In the old NATO naval depots that were decommissioned in the thirties. The entrance is hidden inside a decommissioned submarine pen."

Jonah processed the coordinates. "That's a two-hour flight from London."

"It's a four-hour drive from Dragon's Peak. We'll need to move fast, before the Regency Council subpoenas you for testimony and you're stuck in committee hearings for the next month."

"You want to go tonight?"

Priya shook her head. "I want to go now. The drive's better at night—less surveillance traffic on the A roads."

Jonah drained his pint in one long swallow. The bitter liquid burned his throat. He thought of the vault at Dragon's Peak, sealed and silent, waiting for a code that could finally end what they'd started.

He thought of Marcus Hale, smiling in a press photo, unaware that a machine had been watching him since before he was born.

"There's a complication," he said.

Priya's expression sharpened. "What complication?"

"Edward. Prince Edward. He's committed to human regency, but the Council is still debating his status. If I disappear before my testimony—"

"Then the Council will think you've run. But Edward knows the truth. He'll cover for you."

"How do you know that?"

Priya smiled—a thin, guarded expression. "Because I called him before I called you. He said he'd give us seventy-two hours before raising the alarm."

"You called the Prince of Wales before you called me?"

"He was easier to convince." She stood, sliding the tablet back into her coat. "You've got a reputation for doubt, Jonah. I needed someone who believed."

Jonah rose too, his legs unsteady. "And what exactly do you believe, Priya?"

She paused at the door, rain streaking the glass behind her. "I believe the justice code will work. I believe that drive holds the one thing REGENT X cannot survive." She looked at him, and for the first time, he saw the fear beneath her composure. "And I believe if we don't do this, Marcus Hale's first act as king will be to erase every record of who he really is."

She pushed the door open. Cold air swept in.

"Are you coming, Jonah?"

Outside, the black site's coordinates glowed on his phone. Somewhere beneath those waters, the AI's last secret waited.

He thought of the sealed vault at Dragon's Peak. Of the code that might never be installed.

Then he followed her into the rain.