Chapter 300

“Four days have passed.”

At Isaac’s sigh, Baekgyeong answered with a sneer.

“Yeah. You slept like a baby.”

As if Isaac were the one responsible for losing Yoon Siron, Baekgyeong stared at him with a look so sharp it seemed he might cut him down on the spot.

The seventeenth meant it had been four days since the Somora Prison escape. With no memories surfacing from the depths of sleep, it meant he’d remained unconscious the whole time. In the meantime, Siron had been abducted, and Gezar Bazelli’s execution had been carried out.

Isaac let out a low groan. From the great ruin inside his chest a cold wind seemed to blow; dark, stinging memories rose like dust. Panting lightly, he pushed himself upright.

The view beyond the windshield was unfamiliar. Mid-rise buildings, around twenty stories, formed a forest on either side of a boulevard. Their car was parked in a lot inside the boulevard.

“Where are we?”

“Near the Hybris Baggers City Branch.”

It was the Technovalley area on the outskirts of Baggers City, the one he’d heard about in Siron’s tales of derring-do. Strictly speaking it had been Lewis McCarthy’s adventures, but thanks to Siron’s vivid reenactments Isaac had some idea of what was happening at the various Hybris branches.

“Was Siron kidnapped here?”

Baekgyeong shook his head at Isaac’s question.

“Doesn’t look like it. They wouldn’t throw a rare Omega to just any Alpha at a bargain rate.”

He lifted binoculars to his eyes. Cracking the window a touch, he studied a twenty-story building roughly three hundred meters away and answered.

“I’m trying to find where Siron is being held. For now, there’s no lead.”

At Baekgyeong’s tired words, Isaac said:

“Give me the laptop from my bag.”

“Your laptop got soaked with seawater.”

“...I put it in a waterproof pouch.”

“A lot happened while you were out.”

Grinding his teeth like he was sick of it all, Baekgyeong glared at Isaac in the back seat.

“I pulled you out of the ocean when you were dying, and because you needed a transfusion I even kidnapped an Alpha to save you. You’re going to repay the debt for your life.”

Isaac listened in silence, then asked:

“A transfusion?”

Baekgyeong grimaced as if a memory he didn’t want to recall had surfaced. Isaac looked down at the inside of his arm for the mark where the needle had gone in, but the wound had long since healed; there was no trace.

“Did you kill the donor?”

At Isaac’s question, Baekgyeong’s expression twisted into something brutal. Swallowing dryly, he pressed a fist against his chest as if rubbing at something hard and knotted near his heart.

“Yeah. I didn’t mean to kill him, but... he died for nothing more than your life.”

“What about the body?”

“I buried him deep where no one goes.”

“And the doctor who treated me?”

Baekgyeong looked at Isaac with eyes soaked in disgust, as if facing an animal rather than a human being. Isaac met the look with a blank expression. As if it wasn’t even worth answering, Baekgyeong handed over a laptop. He had been paid for it, but it belonged to the doctor who had saved Isaac’s life.

Isaac eyed the unfamiliar machine with suspicion, then opened a browser and typed a complex address into the bar without hesitation. A site built in Russian loaded sluggishly. Several minutes passed before the home page fully appeared: a search box at the top, and beneath it a Russian satellite map filling the screen.

Isaac entered a serial number in the search box. The satellite globe spun rapidly as if the earth were rotating, then slowed, and one sector began to close in at a crawl.

The location looked familiar somehow. The place-name wasn’t in English, but Baekgyeong could tell.

“Baggers City? What is this?”

He asked without taking his eyes off the map.

“Siron’s last transmitted location. The final ping was around 1 p.m. on the 13th.”

“Transmitted? ...Who’s doing the transmitting?”

Isaac said flatly:

“I implanted a Subdermal Implant Chip in Siron’s back. A tracking chip.”

Baekgyeong’s face contorted in shock.

“You implanted... a chip? In Yoon Siron’s body?”

He spat the question out, half choked on disbelief.

“Either way, isn’t it fortunate we can know where Yoon Siron is?”

When Isaac clicked the marked coordinates, the page switched to a list. Time-stamped coordinates were logged by date. Starting from July, Baekgyeong scrolled and then shot Isaac a look of sheer incredulity.

Ignoring him, Isaac clicked the coordinate set for the most recent date. October 13—the day Siron, abducted during the prison break, had last transmitted. Either Hybris had found and removed the Subdermal Implant Chip in Siron’s back, or Siron had been moved somewhere tracking couldn’t penetrate.

“The last record is four days old.”

Isaac entered the coordinates onto the map and traced the time-stamped movement route for the 13th. Siron had crossed by sea from the west of Kamti Island down to the south of Helso, then stayed several hours at a seaside mansion. After that, whether by helicopter or not, he traveled in a straight line across sea and land back to Baggers City.

Pointing the cursor at the map’s location icon, he said:

“This is the last confirmed spot.”

Baekgyeong snatched the laptop from him and zoomed in on the map. What looked like signage was mounted on the building’s upper façade, but the satellite angle hid it. Opening a new tab, he plugged the coordinates into an online map and found the place: Baggers City Integrated Psychological Health Center.

“The Integrated Psychological Health Center? You’re saying that’s Siron’s last location?”

“Yeah. Jackson Cliff. He’s the founding director of that facility.”

Jackson Cliff. The name tugged at something familiar. Baekgyeong thought a moment about where he’d heard it. It came back quickly: the psychological counselor who’d shared a table with the Governor at the charity event at the Elm Hotel. Later, while searching Warden Malcolm’s house, he’d found a brochure for Those Who Overcame Grief, the group therapy circle Jackson Cliff ran, in a box of the eldest daughter’s things.

“Jackson Cliff is connected to Hybris?”

Isaac gave a slight nod.

“Yeah. Joseph Elliott—he and Jackson Cliff are the same man.”

A shiver of shock swept across Baekgyeong’s face in the darkness. As the crimes tied to the name Joseph Elliott rose one by one, the reality hit him that the figure they’d been chasing wasn’t a phantom.

“He’s Hybris’s mastermind.”

Isaac lifted a shoulder, unwilling to be categorical.

“It’s certain Hybris’s crimes tie back to Jackson Cliff, but there’s no proof yet that he’s the one directing them.”

“Well. My money says he’s the head.”

Baekgyeong summarized—briefly but without omitting the essentials—what he’d uncovered, including information on Joseph Elliott he’d found in Spencer’s materials.

While he spoke at length, Isaac’s face remained expressionless, chiseled like stone. At last, as if the pieces had settled in his head, he drew a breath and tossed out a toneless line.

“Good work.”

Baekgyeong’s face crumpled as if he’d been slapped with an insult. At his hardening scowl, Isaac let out a faint, derisive breath.

“You even managed to crack the drive encryption.”

Weariness from a long ordeal washed over Baekgyeong’s grimace.

“I had help from 3547, but it was a fucking nightmare anyway.”

“3547—the schizophrenic patient?”

“Yeah.”

“Right, he used to be a New York Times journalist.”

The fact that 3547 had been a New York Times reporter was something Siron had dug up by combing Twibber. Without Siron, Spencer’s drive would never have been decrypted—even if they died and came back a hundred times.

“First, we map the terrain and the building around the Psychological Health Center.”

Isaac carefully surveyed the area around the center on the satellite map. The place where Siron’s location had last transmitted. Thinking of Siron, close enough to seize yet slipping away, Baekgyeong felt a pang of urgency. He watched Isaac’s sudden focus with a look that was equal parts relief and something more opaque.

“You. Are you going to help find Yoon Siron?”

Isaac’s scrolling halted.

“You haven’t forgotten, have you—that the condition for an Imprint is love.”

Amazingly, he seemed to have let that crucial fact slip for a moment. The original purpose—turning Yoon Siron into an Omega to Imprint with him so he could prolong his life—had gone blurry, and another reason seemed bold enough to try to take its place. As if spring sunlight had briefly touched his ice-blue eyes.

Parched, Baekgyeong sniped:

“When both love each other. ...That fairy-tale condition for children—you’re never going to pull that off. So what’s your goal? Saving Siron, or is it still the extinction of Alphas?”

Isaac’s gaze drifted across the map like flotsam, stalled for a long while.

“I don’t care to answer.”

“Why?”

“Shut up. I won’t allow more questions.”

Somehow, at some point, he’d equipped himself: he let the holster at his waist show, and inside sat a Glock with a full magazine.

“You fucking bastard. I really regret saving you.”

Baekgyeong snarled through his teeth. Isaac glanced over the display with a snort and straightened up. The ceiling was low, so he kept his back bent as he spread a duffel on the floor and began selecting the weapons he needed.

“Let’s move. I need to see, with my own eyes, the site of the last transmission.”