Read Chapter 16: The Death of Truth

The broadcast room stank of ozone and burnt wiring. Through the cracked viewport, Finn could see the main antenna array sparking against the night sky, its signal dying in slow, sputtering arcs. His leg screamed where the bullet had clipped him, and the makeshift bandage Anya had pressed over his side was already dark with blood.

“They’re killing it,” Anya said, her voice flat. She was hunched over the control console, fingers flying across a cracked panel. “Forty-one percent went out. Forty-one percent of Chen’s files. The rest didn’t even get past the local relay.”

Finn dragged himself across the floor, boots scraping through water that had seeped up from the lower maintenance decks. “The failsafe node in the floodgate bunker. That’s still live. You said it was undetected.”

“It is. For now.” She turned to him, and he saw the exhaustion carved into her face. “But they’re tracing the signal path. It took them four minutes to kill this feed. It’ll take them maybe six to find the backup once they triangulate the node’s heartbeat.”

A low thrum shook the deck. The security sweep was getting closer.

Finn grabbed the console edge to steady himself. Pain lanced through his side, sharp and white. He couldn’t run much longer, couldn’t fight much longer. And somewhere in a safehouse in the low zone, Tess was lying on a cot with a bullet wound in her chest and no one to watch the door.

“Then we give them the node,” he said.

Anya stared at him. “What?”

“We trade the backup location for Tess. For us. For a way out of this goddamn tower.” He met her eyes. “The official. The one I heard in the holding area, the one who’s running the sweep. He wants the evidence gone. We give him the location. He lets us walk. Tess stays alive.”

“Finn, that evidence is the only thing that can stop the drain. Without it, the sacrifice plan goes through tomorrow. Forty thousand people in the low zone, gone. You understand that?”

“I understand that Tess dies tonight if I don’t do something.” His voice cracked. “She got shot because of me. She’s lying in a room that has no walls against what’s coming. I’m not going to trade her life for a cause. Not even this one.”

Anya was silent for a long moment. The thrumming grew louder, boots on metal stairs somewhere below.

“You’re a fool,” she said softly.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Help me find him.”

The official’s name was Voss. Finn hadn’t known that until they were marched—half-carried by Anya, his arm bleeding through the bandage—into a control room overlooking the floodgate substructure. Voss was a thin man with silver hair, immaculate in a high-zone uniform despite the chaos. He looked at Finn the way a man looks at a stain on his shoe.

“The backup node,” Voss said. “Give me the exact coordinates, and you and the girl are free. Transport to the low zone. Medical care of my choosing. As much of a head start as you can manage before the gates close.”

“The gates close tomorrow. That’s not a head start, that’s a tombstone.”

Voss’s lips thinned. “The initiation date has been accelerated. The drain begins in twelve hours, not twenty-four. The district will flood at dawn. If you want to be on high ground, you’ll take the deal now.”

Finn’s stomach dropped. Twelve hours. He’d bought them almost nothing.

“And if I don’t?”

“Then your friend in the safehouse—Mistress Wu’s establishment, yes, we know—will be visited by a surgical team that specializes in retrieving information from people who don’t want to give it.” Voss’s voice was calm, almost bored. “She’s still weak. I doubt she’ll survive the experience.”

Finn saw Anya flinch. He saw the map of the floodgate control substructure in his mind—the hidden node, tucked behind a dead relay, its data heartbeat barely a whisper in the noise of the system. He’d walked through those corridors as a marine engineer. He knew every blind access point, every dead line.

He could give it up. He could point Voss at it and watch the evidence die in a puff of deleted code.

Or he could lie.

“Node Twenty-Seven,” Finn said. “Substructure level four, behind the auxiliary power coupling. It’s hardwired into the failsafe network. You’ll need a mechanical key to access the casing.”

Voss nodded to a subordinate, who tapped at a handheld. The subordinate looked up. “Confirmed. Node Twenty-Seven shows active.”

Voss smiled like a knife parting skin. “Excellent. I’ll have it purged immediately.” He gestured to a guard. “Get him medical attention. Then put them on a transport to the low zone. They’re of no further use to me.”

Anya looked at Finn as the guard hauled him upright. Her eyes asked the question.

He gave the smallest shake of his head.

Node Twenty-Seven was real. It existed. But Danny’s key—the one that had opened the service duct, the one that had been in Finn’s pocket since this nightmare began—opened a secondary housing behind it. A dead-line relay that hadn’t been on any schematic since the walls went up.

The evidence wasn’t in Node Twenty-Seven.

It was in the place that didn’t exist.

“You’re a worse liar than I thought,” Anya murmured as they were shoved toward the transport hatch.

“Maybe,” Finn said, tasting blood in his mouth. “But I’m a better engineer.”

Outside, the first grey light of false dawn crept across the floodwalls. Twelve hours to the drain. Twelve hours to find another way, with no evidence, no allies in the high zone, and a district full of people who didn’t know they were about to drown.

He let them load him onto the transport. He let the sedative in the needle take hold.

When he woke, he’d be back in the low zone. Back to Tess. Back to the water.

And there was only one way to stop the flood.