3. The Aegis Archives

The Halcyon Trust Bank rose from the financial district like a monument to greed, its marble columns and bronze doors promising security to those wealthy enough to afford it. Ryan studied the building from the shadows of an alley across the street, his body screaming for rest and medication. Dawn had given way to a grey morning, the sky heavy with unfallen rain, and the city was beginning to stir.

"We can't just walk through the front door," Kellan whispered, crouched beside him. "We look like we just crawled out of a grave."

It was an accurate assessment. Their clothes were torn and stained with mud and blood. Ryan's face was a mask of exhaustion, his eyes sunken in hollows of shadow. Kellan was not much better—a gash on his forehead had crusted over, but the bruising around it was deepening to purple.

"We're not using the front door. Finch mentioned a service entrance through the basement." Ryan pulled out the surgeon's identification card, turning it over in his hands. "This gets us into the tunnel system. After that, we improvise."

They circled the block, searching for the service entrance. It was tucked away in a side alley, half-hidden behind a row of industrial waste bins—a steel door with a keycard reader and a single security camera mounted above it. Ryan studied the camera's angle, calculating the blind spot.

"There. The camera covers the door but not the approach from the east side of the alley. If we stay close to the wall, we can reach the reader without being seen."

"And the card will work?"

"Only one way to find out."

They moved together, pressed against the damp brick wall, their footsteps silent on the cracked pavement. Ryan's spine sent jolts of agony through his body with every movement, but he had pushed the pain into a corner of his mind, a locked room he would deal with later. Or never. Never was also acceptable.

The card reader beeped once, a red light flashing. Ryan's heart stopped. Then the light turned green, and the door clicked open with a pneumatic hiss.

"Finch must not have reported his card stolen yet," Kellan murmured.

"Either that or they want us to come inside. A trap is more efficient than a manhunt." Ryan pulled the door open, revealing a concrete stairwell descending into darkness. "Stay alert."

The tunnel system beneath the financial district was a relic of Eldoria's industrial past—brick-lined passages built a century ago to connect the city's most powerful institutions. In those days, the robber barons had moved between their banks and their clubs and their private residences without ever touching the public streets, sealed away from the common masses they exploited.

The irony was not lost on Ryan. The same tunnels that had once protected the elite now served as his path to their destruction.

Emergency lights cast pools of dim yellow along the passage, barely enough to navigate by. The air was cold and smelled of damp stone and old secrets. Kellan walked close behind him, one hand on Ryan's shoulder, the other holding a flashlight they had scavenged from a maintenance closet near the entrance.

"How far do you think it goes?" Kellan asked.

"Finch said the Heritage Foundation is adjacent to the bank. Shouldn't be more than a few hundred meters."

They walked in silence for another ten minutes, following the tunnel as it curved gently to the left. Doors lined the walls at irregular intervals—some labeled with faded brass plaques, others unmarked. The Heritage Foundation, when they found it, was behind a door that looked exactly like all the others, distinguished only by a small inscription: EFH—Archives Access.

"This is it." Ryan pressed Finch's card against the reader. Green light. The door swung open.

The room beyond was not what Ryan had expected. He had imagined something clinical—steel shelves and fluorescent lights and the sterile efficiency of modern bureaucracy. Instead, he found himself in what appeared to be a museum.

The walls were lined with oil portraits of men in severe suits, their expressions ranging from smug to cruel. Display cases held artifacts arranged with curatorial precision—antique hunting rifles, faded photographs, a leather-bound ledger opened to a page filled with elegant cursive. The air smelled of old paper and furniture polish, and the carpet beneath Ryan's feet was thick enough to swallow his footsteps entirely.

"Welcome to the Eldorian Heritage Foundation," a voice said from the shadows. "I've been expecting you."

Ryan spun, raising Finch's rifle, but the figure that emerged from behind a towering bookshelf was not a threat. She was perhaps seventy years old, with silver hair pulled back in a severe bun and eyes that gleamed with sharp intelligence behind wire-rimmed spectacles. She wore a conservative grey dress and held a cup of tea that steamed gently in the cold archive air.

"My name is Helena Rourke. I'm the archivist here." She took a sip of her tea, utterly unperturbed by the rifle pointed at her chest. "You must be Subject Seven. I watched your progress through the forest last night. Quite impressive. We haven't seen such resourcefulness since the Harcourt incident."

Ryan did not lower the rifle. "You're with the Aegis."

"I am employed by the Heritage Foundation. The Aegis is merely our most significant donor." Helena gestured toward a reading table surrounded by leather chairs. "Please, sit down. You look like you're about to collapse, and I have no intention of summoning security. Quite the opposite, in fact."

Kellan looked at Ryan, uncertainty written across his face. Ryan hesitated, then lowered the rifle. His instincts told him this woman was dangerous, but not in the way the hunters had been. Her danger was of a different kind entirely—older, more patient, wrapped in civility and tea service.

"You said you were expecting us," Ryan said, not sitting.

"I've been expecting someone like you for thirty years." Helena set down her teacup and moved toward a computer terminal half-hidden behind a marble bust of some long-dead industrialist. "I was hired by this foundation in my youth, fresh out of university with a degree in archival studies. I believed I would be preserving history. Instead, I discovered I was complicit in burying it."

She tapped a few keys on the terminal, and a section of the wall slid aside to reveal a secondary archive—rows of filing cabinets that looked significantly older than the museum-quality displays in the main room.

"The public collection is sanitized. The Halcyon Club's founding narrative is presented as a philanthropic society dedicated to conservation and traditional sporting pursuits. But the real records are here. A century of culling operations. Membership rosters. Financial records. Audio recordings of council meetings. Everything."

Ryan felt something shift in his chest—not hope, not yet, but the possibility of hope. "Why are you showing us this?"

"Because I am old, Mr. Mercer. Because I have spent my entire adult life cataloging atrocities I was powerless to prevent. Because the Harcourt incident taught me that individual acts of defiance are insufficient." Helena's eyes met his, and they were the eyes of someone who had been waiting a very long time. "The Aegis cannot be brought down by one survivor's testimony. It requires systematic exposure. And for that, I need someone who knows how to fight."

They spent the next three hours in the hidden archive, and what Ryan found there reshaped everything he thought he knew about his country.

The Aegis had been founded in 1872, in the aftermath of the Eldorian Economic Collapse. A group of industrialists, bankers, and politicians had gathered at the Briarwood estate to discuss what they termed "the problem of surplus population." The collapse had created thousands of displaced workers, homeless and hungry, and the newly formed security administration was overwhelmed by the demand for relief.

The solution, proposed by a steel magnate named Corbin Halcyon, was elegantly monstrous. The administration would identify individuals whose ongoing support represented a "net loss to the state"—the chronically ill, the permanently disabled, the unemployable. These individuals would be designated for "administrative removal," their benefits quietly terminated and their names removed from the rolls. Meanwhile, the Halcyon Club would host regular hunting events on the Briarwood estate, drawing its prey from the pool of the disappeared.

Over the decades, the system had been refined. Judges were recruited to the council, their rulings calibrated to ensure a steady supply of victims. Doctors were enlisted to provide medical justifications for denial, their diagnoses tailored to the needs of the hunt. Police commissioners and security officials were compensated for their discretion, ensuring that any investigation into the disappeared would be quietly buried.

"The language they used changed over time," Helena said, pulling out a series of council minutes bound in leather folders. "In the 1870s, they spoke openly of 'culling the weak.' By the 1920s, the terminology shifted to 'population management.' After the war, it became 'resource optimization.' And now, in the current council records, they refer to it as 'sustainable security administration.' The morality of it has been continually rewritten to match the sensibilities of each generation."

Ryan read through the minutes, his hands growing colder with each page. In 1954, a council member named Thaddeus Ashworth had argued against expanding the culling program, calling it "a stain upon the national conscience." The minutes recorded his censure, his removal from the council, and his subsequent designation as a hunt participant. He had been eliminated the following season, and his name had never appeared in any public record.

"They killed their own to protect the secret," Ryan said.

"They have killed anyone who threatened exposure." Helena pulled out another folder, this one thicker than the rest. "Which brings me to the Harcourt incident. Elliott Harcourt was an architect who was designated for culling after a workplace accident left him partially paralyzed. Like you, he survived the initial hunt. Like you, he sought to expose the truth."

"What happened?"

"He gathered evidence—photographs, recordings, witness testimony. He approached a journalist at the Eldorian Chronicle, a man named Vernon Cross. Cross published a series of articles that caused a minor scandal. The council responded by discrediting both men. Harcourt was portrayed as a disgruntled benefits fraudster seeking revenge. Cross was fired, his career destroyed. And Harcourt was designated for the next season's hunt, where he was killed before he could release his full cache of evidence."

Helena opened the folder, revealing a series of photographs—a man in his forties, dark-haired, with the same hollow-eyed determination Ryan recognized from his own reflection.

"The evidence Harcourt gathered was never found. The council searched for it for years. They eventually concluded that Harcourt had hidden it somewhere before his death, but they never located the cache. Some of us believe it's still out there, waiting for someone to find it."

Ryan stared at the photograph of Elliott Harcourt, feeling an unexpected kinship with this dead stranger. Two men, separated by a decade, bound by the same impossible mission. Harcourt had failed. But Harcourt had been alone.

"I need copies of everything," Ryan said. "All the records. The membership lists. The financial documents. Everything that proves the connection between the Halcyon Club, the Aegis, and the security administration."

Helena nodded, as if she had been waiting for him to say exactly that. "The digitization equipment is in the back room. It will take several hours to copy the entire archive. In the meantime, there's something else you should see."

She led them deeper into the archive, past rows of filing cabinets and shelves of leather-bound ledgers, until they reached a door marked with a single word: Testimonies.

"These are recordings made by council members over the years. Some were recorded as oral histories for the foundation's internal records. Others were confessions, made in old age, by members who could no longer reconcile their actions with their consciences. I've spent years listening to them, trying to understand how ordinary people become complicit in extraordinary evil."

She selected a tape from a shelf marked 1963-1967 and inserted it into a playback device. The voice that emerged was old and tired, cracking with age and something that might have been regret.

"My name is Cornelius Ashworth. I am recording this testimony on the twenty-third of October, 1967, in the hope that someday someone will find it and understand. My brother Thaddeus was not a traitor to the council. He was the only one of us who recognized what we had become. I voted for his removal. I voted for his death. I have carried that weight for thirteen years, and it has broken me in ways that no hunting accident ever could."

The tape continued for another hour—a detailed accounting of council operations, membership, and procedures. Cornelius Ashworth named names. He described the selection process, the financial arrangements, the elaborate cover stories used to explain the disappearances of hundreds of people over the decades.

When the recording ended, the archive was silent except for the soft hum of the playback machine.

"How many recordings are there?" Ryan asked.

"Forty-seven. Spanning from 1921 to 2014. Some are briefer than others. Some are... difficult to listen to. But together, they form a complete portrait of the Aegis and its operations."

Kellan, who had been silent for most of the archive exploration, spoke for the first time. "My brother. Marcus Voss. Would he be in these records?"

Helena's expression softened with something that looked painfully like pity. "The candidate rosters are in the main filing system. The year of designation, the hunter assigned, the outcome. If your brother was taken by the culling, his name will be there."

Kellan turned away, his jaw tight. Ryan understood. There were truths that could not be unlearned, and once they stepped through that door, there would be no going back.

"I'll find the records for you," Helena said gently. "Take your time."

While Kellan searched for his brother's file, Ryan worked with Helena to begin copying the archive. The digitization equipment was old but functional, and Helena moved through the process with the practiced efficiency of someone who had been preparing for this moment for decades.

"You were never just an archivist, were you?" Ryan asked, watching her work.

"I was a historian who discovered she was living inside a crime scene." Helena fed another stack of documents into the scanner. "When I first realized what the foundation was hiding, I went to the authorities. The police commissioner at the time was a council member. He had me detained for psychiatric evaluation. By the time I was released, my credibility was destroyed, and I understood that there was no one I could trust outside these walls."

"So you stayed. For thirty years."

"I stayed because the archive needed a guardian. Someone who could preserve the evidence until the right person came along." She looked at Ryan with those sharp, patient eyes. "I believe that person is you, Mr. Mercer. You have something Elliott Harcourt lacked—military training, tactical experience, and an understanding of how to fight an asymmetrical war. The question is whether you have something else as well."

"What's that?"

"The willingness to see it through to the end. Harcourt wanted justice. But justice requires compromise, patience, and sometimes actions that feel indistinguishable from the enemy's. The Aegis has survived for a century by understanding that morality is not absolute—it can be shaped, reinterpreted, and weaponized. To defeat them, you must be willing to navigate that same moral complexity."

Ryan thought about Langford, bound to a tree in the forest. He thought about Finch, left alive but helpless. He thought about the cold thing in his chest and what it might become if he fed it enough anger.

"I've already killed two men tonight," he said quietly. "I don't know if I can justify more."

"The question isn't whether you can justify it. The question is whether you can live with it." Helena removed a final folder from the cabinet and handed it to him. "This is the current council roster. Every name, every position, every role in the culling operation. The man at the top is Alistair Vane's father, Reginald Vane. He has chaired the council for twenty-three years. He answers to no one."

Ryan opened the folder. The names were arranged in a hierarchy, each accompanied by a photograph and a brief biographical note. Judge Donetta Ambrose. Dr. Alistair Finch. Carter Langford. Aldric Vane. Reginald Vane. And dozens of others—politicians, business leaders, medical professionals, law enforcement officials. The pillars of Eldorian society, every one of them soaked in blood.

"There's something else you should know," Helena said. "The council is holding its annual gala tonight at the Briarwood manor house. Every member will be in attendance. It's their most sacred tradition—a celebration of the season's culling, complete with masked ball and ceremonial toasts. If you want to expose them all at once, there will never be a better opportunity."

Ryan stared at the roster, his mind already working through the tactical implications. A gala. A masked ball. Every member in one place, isolated from their security details, believing themselves untouchable.

"How do I get in?"

"There's a service entrance for catering staff. The foundation has historical ties to the event—we provide the archival displays they use as decoration. I can get you on the list." Helena hesitated, and for the first time, Ryan saw something like fear in her eyes. "But once you're inside, you'll be completely alone. No backup. No extraction. If you're caught, they won't bother with a hunt. They'll execute you on the spot and feed your body to the hounds."

"I've been alone before." Ryan closed the folder and tucked it into his jacket. "I need to find Kellan. Then we need to finish copying the archive and get out of here before the Auxiliary tracks us down."

He found Kellan in a corner of the archive, sitting on the floor with a folder open in his lap. The young engineer's face was wet with tears, but his expression was not grief. It was something harder. Something that looked a lot like the cold thing in Ryan's own chest.

"Marcus Voss," Kellan said, his voice steady despite the tears. "Designated Season 47. Hunter assigned: Alistair Finch. Outcome: eliminated at extraction point, three kilometers from the eastern boundary. Date: March 14, 2017."

Ryan crouched beside him. "I'm sorry."

"I'm not." Kellan closed the folder. "I'm not sorry, because now I know. For a year, I thought my brother had abandoned his family. I thought he had given up and walked away. But he didn't. He fought. He almost made it out." He looked at Ryan, and his eyes were burning. "I want to finish what he started. Whatever it takes."

"The archivist has a plan. There's a gala tonight at Briarwood. Every council member will be there. If we can get inside, we can expose them all at once."

"Then let's do it."

"It's a one-way trip, Kellan. Once we're inside, there's no guarantee we're coming out."

Kellan stood, tucking his brother's file into his jacket. "I stopped expecting to come out of this alive the moment the hounds started baying. But if I'm going to die, I'm going to die making sure every single one of these monsters goes down with me."

Ryan nodded. He understood that sentiment better than he wanted to admit.

They spent another hour copying files, transferring the archive's contents to a portable drive Helena provided. The evidence was damning—enough to bring down not just the council but the entire network of complicity that had sustained the Aegis for a century. Financial records traced the flow of money from the security administration's budget to the Halcyon Club's accounts. Medical reports showed the systematic denial of benefits to designated candidates. Council minutes recorded the selection of victims with the casual detachment of a board meeting discussing quarterly earnings.

But even as the drive filled with data, Ryan knew that evidence alone would not be enough. The Aegis had survived the Harcourt incident because they controlled the narrative. They controlled the media, the police, the courts. To expose them effectively, the evidence needed an audience—a public spectacle that could not be ignored or buried.

The gala was the key. The gala was the stage.

"There's one more thing," Helena said, as they prepared to leave. She pressed a small object into Ryan's hand—a key, old and tarnished, attached to a tag labeled Harcourt—Personal Effects. "Elliott Harcourt's evidence cache was never found. But before he died, he sent a message to a contact at the foundation. He said the cache was hidden 'where the hunt begins and ends.' I never understood what that meant. Perhaps you will."

Ryan closed his hand around the key, feeling the weight of a dead man's unfinished mission. "Where the hunt begins and ends. That could be anywhere."

"Or it could be somewhere very specific. Harcourt was an architect. He thought in terms of structure and symbolism. If anyone can decipher his meaning, perhaps it's someone who understands how the Aegis thinks."

They left the Heritage Foundation through the tunnel system, emerging into a different alley in a different part of the financial district. The rain had finally begun to fall, a cold drizzle that plastered Ryan's hair to his forehead and soaked through his torn jacket.

They had four hours until the gala began. Four hours to prepare, to plan, to somehow infiltrate the most heavily guarded event in the Eldorian social calendar. Ryan's body was running on fumes and adrenaline, the pain in his spine a constant reminder of his mortality.

But there was no time to rest. No time to heal. No time for anything but the mission.

They found shelter in an abandoned warehouse on the industrial edge of the city, a place where the Auxiliary would not think to look. While Kellan worked on improving their equipment—refining the homemade explosives, modifying the captured radios for monitoring—Ryan studied the council roster and the maps of the Briarwood estate that Helena had provided.

The manor house was a fortress, designed in the nineteenth century by the same architect who had built the Halcyon Trust Bank. The service entrance was located on the eastern side, accessed through a courtyard that would be crowded with catering vehicles and delivery trucks. The gala itself was held in the grand ballroom, a three-story chamber with balconies overlooking the main floor. The control room, where Aldric Vane coordinated the hunt, was located in the basement, accessible through the wine cellar.

"We need three things," Ryan said, spreading the maps across a rusted workbench. "Access to the control room, access to the ballroom, and a way to broadcast whatever we find. The council has its own encrypted communication network—if we can hijack it, we can transmit to every device in the estate."

"And then what?" Kellan asked. "We just... show everyone the evidence?"

"We show everyone everything. The recordings. The documents. The confessions. We turn their own celebration into a public trial." Ryan traced a route on the map with his finger. "The service entrance gets us into the catering areas. From there, we can access the wine cellar. The cellar connects to the control room. Once we control the communications, we control the narrative."

"And if we get caught before we reach the control room?"

"Then we make sure the evidence survives even if we don't." Ryan pulled out the portable drive and handed it to Kellan. "Make copies. Upload them to every file-sharing service you can find. Set up dead-man switches—if we don't check in by dawn, the evidence goes public automatically. The council can suppress a single leak, but they can't suppress a flood."

Kellan took the drive, his expression grim but determined. "I can do that. Give me two hours and an internet connection."

While Kellan worked, Ryan examined the key Helena had given him. It was small and unremarkable—the kind of key that might open a safety deposit box or a private locker. The tag attached to it was worn and faded, the handwriting barely legible: Harcourt—Personal Effects.

Where the hunt begins and ends.

Ryan closed his eyes, letting his mind drift through everything he had learned about the Aegis and the Halcyon Club. The hunt began at Briarwood, in the forest that had been designed as a killing ground. But it also began in the courtrooms where judges denied benefits to the vulnerable. It began in the medical offices where doctors falsified diagnoses. It began in the administrative offices where civil servants processed the paperwork of death.

And it ended? Where did it end?

The extraction point. That was where the hunt officially concluded, where survivors were promised safety that never materialized. The extraction point was a lie—a false hope designed to keep the prey moving in predictable patterns. But it was also a physical location, a place on the map, a structure that had existed for decades.

Ryan opened his eyes and looked at the estate map again. The extraction point was marked at the eastern boundary, three kilometers from the manor house. It was labeled simply: EP-7.

Elliott Harcourt had been an architect. He had designed buildings, understood structures, thought in terms of spatial relationships. If he had hidden something at the extraction point, he would have chosen a location that was accessible but not obvious—somewhere the council's search teams would overlook.

"The hunting lodge," Ryan said aloud. "There's a hunting lodge near the extraction point. It's marked on the map as a historical structure, decommissioned in the 1960s. The council probably doesn't even use it anymore. But it's still there."

Kellan looked up from his work. "You think that's where Harcourt hid his evidence?"

"It's where I would have hidden it. A place that's part of the estate but forgotten by its owners. A place where the hunt literally ends." Ryan tucked the key into his pocket. "We'll check it after the gala. Assuming we survive."

The rain had intensified by the time they left the warehouse, a steady downpour that turned the streets into rivers of grey water. Ryan had found a change of clothes in a charity donation bin—a dark jacket and trousers that would pass for catering staff attire if no one looked too closely. Kellan had done the same, though his engineer's hands had trembled as he buttoned the borrowed shirt.

They took a stolen vehicle to the edge of the Briarwood estate, parking in a wooded area half a mile from the service entrance. Through the rain, Ryan could see the lights of the manor house blazing against the dark sky, and he could hear the faint strains of classical music drifting through the trees.

The gala had begun.

"Last chance to walk away," Ryan said.

Kellan checked the radio at his belt, the explosives in his jacket, the drive of copied evidence in his pocket. "I stopped having choices the night they killed my brother. Let's finish this."

They moved through the rain toward the service entrance, two shadows among many, and the manor house loomed before them like a monument to everything the Aegis had built over a century of blood and silence. Somewhere inside, Judge Ambrose was drinking champagne and laughing with her fellow council members, secure in the knowledge that their power was absolute and their crimes were buried beyond discovery.

She was wrong.

Ryan Mercer had been denied his benefits, hunted through a forest, and pushed to the edge of human endurance. But he was still standing. And he was carrying the truth in his pocket like a bomb waiting to detonate.

The service entrance door swung open to admit a delivery of wine crates. Ryan and Kellan slipped through behind the delivery men, heads down, movements purposeful. No one stopped them. No one even looked at them.

The wine cellar was cold and dark, lined with bottles that cost more than Ryan had earned in a year of military service. At the far end, behind a rack of vintage champagne, a steel door led to the control room. Ryan pressed Finch's identification card against the reader, holding his breath as the light flickered.

Green. The door opened.

Aldric Vane was sitting at the control panel, his back to the door, monitoring a bank of screens that showed the gala in progress. He was alone, so confident in his security that he had not bothered to post a guard.

He turned when he heard the door, and his eyes widened with recognition.

"Subject Seven. You're supposed to be dead."

"I get that a lot." Ryan raised Finch's rifle. "Step away from the console. Slowly."

Vane raised his hands, but his expression was not fear. It was something closer to curiosity. "You've made it remarkably far for a man with a shattered spine. The council will be impressed. Perhaps we can come to an arrangement—"

"The arrangement is this. You're going to patch me into the ballroom's audio-visual system. Every screen, every speaker, every device connected to the estate network. You're going to do it now. And if you try anything, I'm going to put a bullet through your knee and let you explain to the council why their game master let the prey walk into their celebration."

Vane studied him for a long moment, and something shifted behind his eyes—a reassessment, a recalibration. "You're not just trying to survive. You're trying to expose us."

"Brilliant deduction."

"The Harcourt incident taught us that exposure is manageable. The media is bought. The authorities are ours. Whatever you broadcast tonight, it will be dismissed as a hoax within twenty-four hours. You'll be discredited, hunted down, and eliminated. Just like Harcourt."

"Maybe." Ryan gestured with the rifle. "But I'm going to make sure every person in that ballroom sees your faces and knows your names before I go down. Now patch me in."

Vane hesitated. Then, slowly, he turned to the console and began typing commands. The screens on the wall flickered, shifting from security feeds to a view of the grand ballroom. The gala was in full swing—hundreds of masked figures in evening dress, dancing and drinking beneath crystal chandeliers. At the far end of the room, on a raised dais, an old man in a white mask was delivering a toast.

"—and so we celebrate another successful season," Reginald Vane was saying, his voice amplified through the hall's speakers. "A season in which the burdens on our security administration have been lightened, and the traditions of our forebears have been honored. Let us raise our glasses to the culling, and to the continued prosperity of the Halcyon Club."

The masked figures raised their glasses. Ryan watched them through the monitor, feeling the cold thing in his chest crystallize into something diamond-hard.

"Now," he said to Aldric Vane. "Cut the toast. Put me on."

Vane pressed a button. The screen showing Reginald Vane went dark, replaced by static. A murmur of confusion rippled through the ballroom.

Ryan picked up the microphone.

"Good evening, members of the Halcyon Club. My name is Ryan Mercer. You may know me as Subject Seven. I'm speaking to you from the control room beneath this manor, where Aldric Vane is currently sitting at my feet with a gun pointed at his head."

He paused, letting the silence stretch.

"I have in my possession the complete archives of the Aegis council—membership records, financial documents, medical reports, and forty-seven audio confessions from your predecessors. Over the next thirty minutes, I'm going to share all of it with you. And when I'm done, the world will know exactly what you are."

He pressed play on the portable drive.

The voice of Cornelius Ashworth filled the ballroom, cracked with age and guilt, confessing to a century of murder. And beneath the manor house, in the cold darkness of the control room, Aldric Vane smiled a thin, predatory smile and said nothing at all.

Ryan noticed the smile. He noticed, too, the small blinking light on the console—a silent alarm, triggered the moment Vane had begun typing. The Auxiliary was already on its way.

But the broadcast had begun. And there was no stopping it now.