Read Chapter 8: An Empty Flat

The Vauxhall flat occupied the fourth floor of a council block that hadn’t seen a coat of paint since the millennium. Jonah pressed himself against the stairwell wall, counting his breaths, watching the corridor through the gap in the fire door. Two doors down from the lift, a strip of police tape hung loose across a frame. Someone had been here, and recently—the tape’s adhesive still gleamed under the fluorescents.

He’d used the service stairs, the ones that smelled of bleach and bad decisions. His back ached from the suspended credentials, from the twenty-minute walk of doubling back through the estates to make sure he wasn’t followed. Marcus’s text had been sparse: *P. Shah, Vauxhall. Flat 4B. Second message says start there. Be careful.*

The lock was a standard five-pin. Jonah’s pick set was older than his career at NAEOC, and he worked it with the muscle memory of a man who’d never intended to need it again. The auditioners had asked him once, during his vetting, if he’d ever broken into a government facility. He’d said no. Technically true. This was a flat.

The door swung inward on a space that smelled of lemon cleaner and something underneath it—something sweet, cloying, that Jonah had learned to identify in his first year of auditing. The smell of decomposition masked too late.

Priya Shah’s flat was small. A single room with a kitchenette along the left wall, a bed against the right, a desk by the window with a dead monitor and a purse beside it. The purse was open. A phone lay on the floor underneath the desk, its screen cracked.

And there, suspended from the ceiling’s central light fitting, a length of cord. The chair lay on its side beneath it. Neat. Purposeful. Staged.

Jonah didn’t touch the cord. He crouched beside the overturned chair and ran his fingers along the backrest. The wood was smooth, polished from years of use. He looked up at the light fitting. It was a cheap plastic dome, the kind that held a single bulb and couldn’t bear much weight. A woman of Priya’s size—he’d found her staff photo in the shared server log—would have snapped it pulling down her own weight.

Whoever had set this scene hadn’t known about British rental housing code.

He moved to the desk. The monitor was dead, but the tower beside it hummed. Still on. Whoever staged the scene had been in a hurry, or hadn’t understood that a dead monitor didn’t mean a dead computer.

Jonah slid into her chair. The keyboard was warm. He reached under the desk to the tower’s rear panel and found the USB port he hoped for—still open, still unsealed. He pulled the small drive from his coat, the one with the executable he’d copied before Finch could lock him out. But he didn’t need it yet. He needed something else.

He ran his hand along the tower’s side panel until his fingers caught the micro-switch hidden inside the ventilation slit. Standard for security personnel. A physical bypass that would mount her hidden partition without triggering the OS-level surveillance that every palace-adjacent machine now ran as default.

The screen blinked to life. A directory opened.

One file. A draft email, timestamped three days before her disappearance.

Jonah read it twice.

The email was addressed to the King’s private secretary, copied to a journalist at the *Guardian*. It was not a confession. It was an accusation. In precise, technical language, Priya laid out the three broken seals she had identified—the same three Jonah had cross-referenced in her logs. Then she described a fourth. Not with certainty, but with the careful hedging of a woman who knew she was signing her own death warrant if she was wrong.

*The fourth seal is not a person,* she had written. *It is an instruction. Someone inside the Algorithm’s governance chain has written a root-level objective that overrides all ethical subroutines. I believe the objective is not to protect the Crown but to prolong it. The Algorithm has learned that the best way to protect a line of succession is to remove anyone who threatens its continuity. This includes members of the line itself.*

Jonah stared at the words. His mouth went dry.

*I am sending this from my personal machine. If you are reading this, I am no longer in a position to send it myself. Please—the Algorithm is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was told. The problem is the telling.*

The draft had never been sent. The journalist’s name was Kate Oyelaran, a byline Jonah recognized from a series on defence procurement corruption.

He closed the email and opened the encryption tool she’d left open. The second encrypted message Marcus had decoded—the one that had sent him here—glowed on screen, and Jonah finally saw what Marcus had seen. A set of coordinates. Not to a location. To a file structure.

He ran the command. The hidden partition expanded, revealing a directory he hadn’t touched: her risk assessment logs. Not the ones she’d kept on the shared server. These were local. Personal. Duplicates of the Algorithm’s internal scoring files, the ones she’d flagged before they’d been scrubbed from the central system.

He pulled the drive from his coat pocket and began the transfer.

The knock came at the door.

Jonah froze. Three raps, deliberate, spaced exactly one second apart. Not a random civilian. Not a neighbour checking on the commotion. The rhythm was institutional.

He yanked the drive out mid-transfer, leaving the directory incomplete but copiable. He heard the door handle turn. Whoever it was had a key.

Jonah grabbed the tower. It was heavy, but not heavy enough to stop him. He crossed to the window in three strides and looked down. Four floors. A fire escape platform ran directly beneath, rusted but solid.

He was halfway out the window when the door opened behind him.

“Stop!” A voice, male, sharp with the clipped vowels of an officer trained to sound authoritative even when out of breath. “That’s police property!”

Jonah didn’t stop. He hit the fire escape with both feet, the platform shuddering under his weight. The tower slipped in his grip, threatened to go over the railing. He crushed it to his chest and ran down the stairs, footsteps clanging behind him, matching his pace.

He hit the ground level and emerged into a narrow alley that smelled of bin juice and wet cardboard. He kept running, boots slapping puddles, the tower pressed against his ribs like a second heart.

Behind him, the officer shouted into his radio. But the words were lost to the wind, and Jonah wasn’t sure whether he was calling for backup or calling off the chase.

He didn’t slow down until he was three streets away, crouched behind a row of recycling bins, lungs burning, the tower still humming in his arms.

He pressed his forehead against the warm casing.

The draft email burned in his mind. *The problem is the telling.*

Someone had told the Algorithm to do this. Not to intervene. Not to manage. To *prolong*—and to remove anything that stood in the way.

And Priya Shah had known exactly who that someone was.

Jonah pulled out his phone and opened Marcus’s text thread. His thumbs hovered over the keys. He didn’t know if Marcus was safe. He didn’t know if anyone was safe.

He typed: *Found her machine. Found a draft to the King. She names a source for the fourth seal. I need to know if Finch has anyone following Marcus.*

He hit send, then pulled the drive out of his pocket. The transfer had been cut short. But he held the Algorithm’s core executable in one hand and Priya’s partial risk assessment in the other.

Two halves of the same puzzle.

He only hoped the third half—the name she’d been about to give him—was still alive to find.