Page 34 of Ghost of Talon Mountain
"Well, I am. And the score's pretty lopsided." I test my range of motion. The shoulder protests but moves. "Besides, I've had worse."
That gets his attention. His eyes flick to mine, question there.
"Chicago," I explain. "Warehouse district. Guy with a Mossberg put two rounds in my chest from fifteen feet. Body armor stopped them, but I had cracked ribs and internal bleeding." I touch the spot over my sternum, remembering. "This is just a scratch."
"Just a scratch." He shakes his head, something almost like a smile ghosting across his face. "You're nuts."
"Says the man who's been living in a hole in the ground for eleven months."
"Touché."
The tension breaks, just a little. Enough that I can breathe without my chest feeling tight.
Chris packs away the medical supplies, hands me a bottle of ibuprofen. "Take three. It'll help with the inflammation."
I swallow them dry, grimace at the bitter taste. My laptop bag sits against the wall where I dropped it. Battery-powered, encrypted, limited use—but right now, it's the most important thing in this shelter.
"I need to work," I say.
"You need to rest."
"I need to work first. Then rest." I reach for the bag, nearly topple sideways when my shoulder screams in protest.
Chris catches me, steadies me. His hand lingers on my good shoulder. "Five minutes. Then you eat and sleep."
"Deal."
He helps me settle cross-legged on the sleeping bag, laptop balanced on my thighs. The screen glows pale blue in the candlelit space, harsh and artificial against the warm flicker of flame. I pull up the photographs from the dead drop—every page of that logbook, every scrap of paper in the cache.
Chris sits beside me, close enough that our shoulders almost touch. His body heat radiates through the thin thermal layer I'm still wearing. "What are you looking for?"
"Patterns." I zoom in on the first page of handwriting. The letters are neat, controlled—someone with military or law enforcement training. "Everyone has a linguistic fingerprint. Word choice, syntax structure, even how they form letters. It's as unique as DNA if you know how to read it."
I point to a line of text—coordinates followed by a notation in Cyrillic mixed with English. The handwriting slants slightly to the right, pressure heaviest on the downstrokes. "See this? The way they abbreviate 'delivery'—'dlvry' instead of 'deliv' or the full word. That's regional. Great Lakes urban, probably Chicago or Detroit."
"Lots of people from Chicago."
"True. But look at the punctuation." I scroll to another entry, highlight a section. "No spaces after periods. Consistent across every single entry in forty pages of notes. That's habitual—probably learned English as a second language where spacing rules are different. And here—" I point to another phrase. "The syntax is off. 'Package arriving Tuesday' instead of 'Package arrives Tuesday.' Non-native English speaker trying to sound fluent but using present progressive incorrectly."
Chris leans closer, his breath warm against my cheek as he studies the screen. The nearness of him is distracting. "You can tell all that from a few sentences?"
"I spent five years analyzing gang communications in Chicago before they let me go undercover. Wiretaps, texts, emails, handwritten notes passed between dealers. You learn to read between the lines." I pull up another file—transcripts from the intercepted drone transmissions Nate gave me weeks ago. My heart rate kicks up as I scan them. "And I've seen this pattern before."
The connections snap into focus, sharp and unmistakable. Same abbreviation style. Same punctuation errors. Same clipped phrasing that sounds almost right but misses the mark by a fraction. The certainty builds with each new match I find.
I open a third file—communications from my Chicago case, the ones that led to the warehouse where I got shot. The coordinator's messages, never traced, never identified. I place them side by side with the Talon Mountain intercepts.
"Look." My finger traces across the screen, pointing out markers. "Both use 'acknowledge' instead of 'confirm.' Both spell 'receive' as 'recieve'—consistent typo, same transposition error. Both use em-dashes for emphasis instead of commas or semicolons." I scroll faster, finding more connections. "The callsigns are different, but the linguistic DNA is identical."
"This is the same person," I say, the certainty absolute now. "The coordinator from my Chicago case—the one who managed the trafficking shipments through the lakes, who vanished before we could ID them. They're here. On this mountain."
Chris goes very still beside me, his body coiled tight. "You're sure?"
"Ninety-eight percent." I scroll through more files, and that's when I find it—buried in the third page of notes, partially obscured by a coffee stain. A callsign I've never seen in any federal database. "And they have a name. Shepherd."
The word hangs between us, heavy with meaning.
"Shepherd." Chris's voice drops to something cold and dangerous. "That's who set up my team. The mole we never identified. Someone with access to federal databases, operational intel, enough reach to coordinate across jurisdictions."
