Page 57 of Broken Embers

This one wasn’t in the earlier folders.

“Facility Epsilon - Contingency Archive”

I double-click.

There’s a pause as it loads, and then—bam. Rows of documents. Scans. Footage.

And that’s when I find it.

The reason Yelena and the RMSAD think they’re untouchable.

The reports detail how Facility Epsilon—supposedly decommissioned fifteen years ago—was secretly reactivated. Not as a research site, but as an execution chamber for failed experiments. Test subjects with mutations or mental breakdowns were terminated and their bodies incinerated, the waste listed as “biohazard disposal.” Some of the images… I can’t look at them. Not fully. But I force myself to keep reading.

My hands tremble slightly as I grab my phone.

I can’t risk this being lost.

Not now. Not ever.

I open the encrypted app Marco gave me—the one he insisted I memorize and use if I ever got my hands on “something too big to keep local.” My hacker best friend might spend his days drunk off Red Bull and writing Bitcoin laundering scripts, but when he builds something, it’s bombproof. This cloud isn’t Google Drive. It’s hidden on a private server farm in Iceland with a double-deadman switch. If I don’t log in every 48 hours or manually delay the countdown, it auto-forwards everything to a preset list of journalists, media outlets, watchdog groups, and whistleblower forums.

And the first destination?

The media company that is owned by my best friend, Leigh.

Even if I disappear, this truth won’t.

I encrypt the folder, tag it “Red Swan,” and send it into the cloud. As it uploads, I lean back, heart racing, watching the progress bar tick up. 32%... 47%...

When it hits 100%, I exhale.

Done.

No going back now.

But what I do need is expert advice on what I’ve been reading to ensure that I’ve understood everything. I know someone who can help. I stand and stretch out my back, grab the laptop, and head down the long, dark corridor of the palace and shudder. This place is eerily quiet.

I get to my mother’s room, and as I’m about to knock, the door opens and my mother yelps.

“Jesus, Rina!” She hisses, holding her heart.

“Sorry, I was coming to speak to you,” I tell her. “I need your help.”

“At five in the morning?” Carla asks.

“Yes, I have something I need you to…” I frown, seeing the hardcover book folded in her hand and her phone. “What were you going to do?”

“I had some things to go over,” Carla answers. She glances back into the room to where Mark is sound asleep. She puts her finger over her lips and gently pulls the door closed. “Let’s go to the landing lounge. It has a gas fire.”

I nod and shiver as it’s freezing in this corridor. We pad quietly into the small seating area on the second-floor landing where all our bedrooms are, and I sit cross-legged on the sofa with my mother beside me. She puts her books next to her as I open the laptop.

I flip the laptop back open and turn the screen toward her.

“I found something.”

Her brow furrows as she leans in. I explain what I uncovered—the twin reports, the faked shutdowns, the dark resurrection of projects under fake titles.

She stiffens. “This... this is the kind of thing that gets people disappeared.”

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