Chapter 13 - The Bloodstained Identification Card
Ghost barked once.
Not randomly. Not in panic.
A sharp warning.
He struck the open folder with one paw, knocking it from Evelyn’s hands. Ethan’s identification card and the brass key slid across the floor.
A thin glass capsule fell from the folder’s spine.
Mason caught it beneath his boot before it shattered.
Inside was a clear liquid.
Eleanor stared at Evelyn.
“You brought a kill agent.”
Evelyn stepped backward.
“It was already in the folder.”
“No,” Eleanor said. “The spine was replaced.”
The two sisters faced each other, identical features carrying entirely different fear.
I remembered the recording from the clinic.
Ethan had said not to trust the officer carrying his file. He had begun to say she might look like Evelyn Ross.
We assumed he meant Eleanor impersonating Evelyn.
But the message on the photograph said Evelyn was not her sister.
Not that Evelyn was false.
That she was not Eleanor’s sister at all.
“DNA,” I said.
Both women looked at me.
“Were you ever tested?”
Eleanor’s mouth tightened. “Our records were sealed at birth.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
The purge timer dropped below eight minutes.
Mason picked up the brass key. “We can settle identity later.”
“No,” I said. “Identity is the operation.”
Someone had built fraudulent histories, planted Mason’s name years before he served, and used two nearly identical women to authorize opposing sides of the same program.
The woman we called Evelyn reached beneath her uniform jacket.
Mason drew his weapon first.
“Hands where I can see them.”
She froze.
Eleanor moved toward the fallen identification card.
Ghost blocked her too.
He trusted neither woman.
I examined Ethan’s photograph. He stood beside Eleanor in a bare room. She wore civilian clothes. His right hand rested against the wall.
Two fingers were extended downward.
Ethan’s old field habit.
He used gestures in photographs to point at details without alerting whoever held the camera.
His fingers indicated Eleanor’s shadow.
The shadow showed a rectangular object attached to her waist.
A transmitter.
I looked at her clothing now.
The same slight shape pressed beneath her coat.
“Mason.”
He understood from my eyes.
Eleanor grabbed the device.
Ghost launched forward and struck her wrist with his muzzle. The transmitter flew across the room.
Evelyn crushed it beneath her heel.
The facility speakers died.
For half a second, silence gave us hope.
Then the purge timer accelerated.
Five minutes vanished instantly.
Two minutes remained.
Eleanor’s calm shattered.
“You don’t understand. That transmitter was holding the purge.”
“You triggered it,” Evelyn said.
“I was tracking the convoy!”
Mason pressed the brass key into a mechanical slot on the server rack. A hidden compartment opened, revealing a black core drive.
The moment he removed it, steel doors opened along the opposite wall.
Behind them stood three armed men in unmarked tactical gear.
The leader removed his mask.
Mason made a sound I had never heard from another human being.
The man had Mason’s eyes.
Daniel Reed looked exactly like the recent photograph.
He raised his weapon toward his son.
“Put the drive down,” he said, “or Ethan Cross dies before you reach the surface.”
Behind him, a second door opened.
Ethan stood on the other side, wrists bound, a black hood being pulled from his head.
His eyes found mine.
Then he looked at Evelyn and shouted one word.
May you like
“Run!”
📖 See why Ethan told us to run from Evelyn—not Daniel Reed—and what she pulled from beneath her decorated uniform in CHAPTER 14. 👇
