Chapter 8: What Callum Left Behind
The northbound platform at Meridian Street was quiet at that hour.
Two people waiting at the far end.
A transit worker moving slowly along the opposite platform.
The overhead lights hummed their flat, institutional note.
Nora walked to the second bench.
Sat down.
Opened her phone and looked at it like a person waiting for a train.
She gave it ninety seconds.
Nobody moved toward her.
The transit worker disappeared around a corner.
She reached behind the wall bracket without looking.
Her fingers found the gap in the tile.
Cold air from behind the wall.
And then the edge of something.
Paper, folded small and tight.
She palmed it.
Stood.
Walked to the far end of the platform and turned her back to the cameras before she opened it.
Callum's handwriting.
She would have known it anywhere — small, even, slightly left-leaning, the letters of a man who had learned to write carefully because he'd learned early that careless words cost you.
*N — if you're reading this, the signal worked.
I'm still in but not for long.
They've started asking questions I can't answer without breaking cover.*
*The network's main coordinator is a man named Stellan Vore.
He operates through three transit hubs — Meridian, Central, and Aldren.
The accounts on the drive trace back to him.
Garrett is his inside contact but not his only one.
There is a second person in the department.
I don't have a name yet.
Only a designation: Relay.*
*I need twenty-four hours.
If I'm not out by then, assume I'm burned and move without me.
Don't wait.
The drive is enough to take Garrett down.
Take Garrett down.*
*Don't come looking for me, Nora.
I mean it this time.*
*— C*
She read it twice.
Folded it.
Put it in her inside pocket.
Don't come looking for me.
She had read those words before, in a text message, two years ago.
She had followed them then.
She had walked away and stayed quiet and rebuilt a life that fit inside the space that silence left.
She was not going to follow them again.
She pulled out her phone and called Marsh.
"I have a name," she said.
"Stellan Vore.
He's the network coordinator.
And there's a second insider — designation Relay, no name yet.
Callum says he needs twenty-four hours."
"We can work with Vore's name," Marsh said immediately.
"That connects the financial trail to a person.
That's what we needed."
"Callum also says don't wait for him."
A pause.
"What do you want to do?"
Nora looked down the empty platform.
The train was coming.
She could feel it before she heard it — the faint vibration in the floor, the shift in the air pressure from the tunnel.
"I want to give him his twenty-four hours," she said.
"And I want to be ready to move the moment they're up."
"Then get back here," Marsh said.
"We have work to do."
The train arrived.
Nora didn't take it.
She walked back toward the exit, the note pressed flat against her ribs, Callum's careful handwriting already memorized and already burning.
May you like
*Don't come looking for me.*
She was already looking.
