Chapter 317

Jackson sized Isaac up quickly. Trying to read the intent behind the question, he asked in a calm tone.

“Do you know me?”

“I do, Joseph Elliott.”

“So you know that name. Not bad.”

Jackson smiled bitterly, like a man whose entire hand had been exposed, and scanned Isaac from head to toe in a quick sweep.

“You’re Isaac Bazelli, right? The real thing is underwhelming. You’re nowhere near the man I saw on CCTV Footage.”

Isaac showed no reaction to Jackson’s provocation. Even with death pressing in, Jackson tried to reclaim his pace and posture with feigned ease, and Isaac watched him in silence.

If Jackson Cliff were the Designer, he wouldn’t have ended up locked in here by his own hand—not unless he had the foul hobby of meditating alone inside a cramped five-square-meter box surrounded by concrete on all sides.

Watching Jackson, Isaac considered a possibility. It was true that Jackson had made an absolute contribution to Hybris becoming what it was today. But the person who built an organization’s foundation didn’t have to be the same person who led it from the beginning.

Isaac’s face hardened, as if the world he had held onto for so long had collapsed and a completely different truth had taken its place.

“You’re not the Designer.”

Jackson snickered.

“Yeah. You’ve got the wrong address.”

“Who locked you up here?”

Jackson’s eyes flicked, fast and calculating. After he finished his mental arithmetic, he opened his mouth.

“The person you’re looking for.”

Isaac fired without hesitation. The round that punched through Jackson’s shirt collar smashed into concrete, bursting gray dust like fireworks. If Jackson had swallowed his spit wrong, the bullet would have ripped his throat apart. Watching the ease drain from Jackson’s side profile, Isaac changed the question.

“Around five in the morning on the eighteenth. The black S-Class parked in the Psychological Health Center lobby. Who was inside it?”

Jackson let out a hollow laugh that bordered on admiration.

“You were watching?”

“Is that man the Designer?”

Jackson barked out a sharp laugh.

“Yeah. He’s the fucking Designer. And now the idiot you are wants to ask who he is this time.”

Arms crossed, Jackson lifted his chin in arrogant defiance.

“Answering isn’t hard. It’s not even worth hiding. You’ll figure out who was in that sedan the moment you run the plate. Hm. Even if you know, I don’t think you’ll have time to use it.”

With a teasing smile, Jackson let a brief pause hang, then spoke in a confident voice.

“Why don’t you join hands with me instead?”

Jackson hurriedly uncrossed his arms and took a step toward Isaac, then—at Isaac’s restraint—raised both hands in surrender and pressed himself back to the door.

“First, hear me out.”

As if drawing the attention of an audience, he rolled up his sleeves.

“I’m a whistleblower. I was secretly carrying out a plan to bring Hybris down, got tailed, and ended up locked in here.”

“What plan did you carry out?”

“I gathered material tied to Hybris. Material bribed politicians, media figures, judges, and prosecutors wouldn’t welcome. Every time I got new material, I saved it to a memory card, sealed it in an envelope, and dropped it in a mailbox. The address was a Manhattan post office box. I’m the only one who knows that post office box address. But... the existence of the memory card was exposed, the Designer grew suspicious, and now I’m like this.”

It was a confession whose truth and lies were hard to separate. But Isaac had a way to judge whether Jackson had actually played the role of a whistleblower.

“Before that, there’s something I want to confirm.”

“What do you want to confirm?”

“Did you write the record about the CellGuard Research Laboratory in the ?”

Jackson’s pupils trembled—so faintly it was almost imperceptible. He was startled that Isaac knew about the CellGuard Research Laboratory, but he hid it with nearly practiced skill. After a short silence, Jackson spoke.

“You mean the report that recorded the fact that the CellGuard Research Laboratory received ten million dollars in research funding from the Helso State government?”

“Yes.”

“Strictly speaking, I didn’t write that report. I was the one who ordered it written. The author was Austin Walker. His real name was Gail Lander. He was a Beta like me, and his whistleblowing was discovered—he was murdered a few days ago.”

Again, it was impossible to know what was true. But on his face as he spoke of his subordinate’s death, there was a devastated emotion that didn’t look like acting—grief from the absence of someone who had once felt close, someone intimate. Feeling a sudden tightness in his chest, Isaac asked,

“Then what about the other publication? Did you order the other one too?”

“The other publication?”

Jackson asked back as if he had no idea what Isaac meant. In the quarterly Urban Infrastructure that a government office published every half year, there had been detailed blueprints of the drainage tunnel Hybris had tried to hide—the one they had occupied. Like a genie’s magic lamp buried deep in desert sand, waiting for someone to find it, it was a covert invitation whose value only someone who understood its meaning could recognize. But Jackson looked as if he didn’t even know the lamp existed.

“So you don’t know what the invitation is.”

“Invitation? What invitation? What... do you mean I don’t know? At least give me something to guess from!”

Flustered, Jackson tried to move toward Isaac, then recoiled at the muzzle aimed at him and backed away.

Isaac thought. Jackson Cliff was not the kind of man who would expose Hybris’s illegal acts for the sake of justice. He certainly hadn’t authored a report that revealed the truth about the CellGuard Research Laboratory.

If he had collected Hybris’s dirty secrets, it would have been solely to keep the knife handle in his own hand—to guarantee his own safety.

“I can’t believe your claim that you siphoned off material that could become Hybris’s scandal.”

“Believe it or don’t. It’s true.”

Jackson spoke hard.

“Help me escape. If you get me out of here, I’ll hand the material over to you. You didn’t come here intending to die, did you?”

Isaac didn’t answer. At Isaac’s silence, Jackson asked with a suspicious expression.

“You have a way out, don’t you?”

“Hah. Who knows. I wasn’t planning to leave alive.”

A thin shock flickered across Jackson’s face.

“Why...?”

After a long silence, Isaac answered with an expression that was hard to distinguish as regret or fatigue.

“Because I thought you were the Designer. I thought if I killed you, I could end everything.”

“Killing the Designer was your entire purpose? ...What about the Omega?”

Jackson asked urgently.

“You weren’t planning to escape with the Omega?”

Isaac didn’t answer. Trying to read what Isaac’s silence meant, Jackson’s eyes moved quickly as he obsessively scanned Isaac’s face. At last, realization settled over him and he spoke.

“You never intended to save the Omega in the first place.”

Isaac, who had been staring at Jackson as if he were lining up a shot, briefly averted his gaze and nodded.

“Yeah.”

“Hah. Not surprising.”

Jackson stared straight into the muzzle still trained on him, his mind turning furiously. After meeting Gezar at Somora Prison, Bazelli would have realized that the condition for Imprint was “love.” The ice-cold man—once he understood that condition was impossible to fulfill—had clearly classified the Omega as unnecessary.

And Isaac even had information about the CellGuard Research Laboratory. If so, he would already have reached the conclusion that Hybris’s ultimate goal was population increase through breeding.

“You realized the Designer’s plan through the Omega. You understood the Omega isn’t just unnecessary to you, but someone who has to be eliminated.”

When Isaac offered no rebuttal, Jackson let out a triumphant laugh. For the first time, feeling a deep sense of resonance with Isaac, Jackson lowered his voice and forced down his excitement.

“Looking at you now, you and I have a lot in common. In fact, I have the same goal as you.”

Isaac’s expression shifted subtly. Jackson interpreted Isaac’s knife-sharp stare as suspicion of his claim.

“I mean it. I also found the plan to increase the trait population through the Omega horrifying. Something disgusting was born—something that should not exist in this world. So I decided I had to stop the future carnage that would unfold because of a single Omega.”

The steady rhythm of Isaac’s heart thudded once, heavy inside his chest—and then his heartbeat began to slip out of sync.

“Stop the carnage? ...You?”

“Hah. You still don’t trust me.”

“I can’t. Because it looks like you’ll never take a single step out of here.”

“You underestimate me.”

Jackson smiled like a man keeping a secret, as if he had done something so bold that Isaac Bazelli couldn’t even imagine it.