The train deposited Maren at the Grenzach station at 4:17 a.m., where the platform was empty and the air tasted of frost and diesel. She carried a single backpack containing two laptops — one connected to the internet, one that had never been and never would be — along with three burner phones, a portable hard drive, and a change of clothes she'd grabbed blindly from her apartment floor.
She wasn't going to the Lake Archen estate. She wasn't stupid.
If Tethys Solutions had locked the property down within hours of Voss's death, then the estate was a fishbowl — every approach monitored, every visitor catalogued, every face matched against databases that most citizens didn't know existed. Going there now would be the equivalent of raising her hand and saying, I know something.
Instead, she was going to see a man who owed her a debt he could never repay.
Kristof Deniel lived in a converted water tower on the outskirts of Grenzach, surrounded by seven acres of neglected farmland and enough surveillance equipment to make a small intelligence agency jealous. He was sixty-one years old, a former signals intelligence analyst for the Verentaal Defense Ministry, and he had been fired — officially "medically retired" — after he'd submitted a classified report suggesting that the ministry's communications infrastructure had been compromised by a private contractor working on behalf of interests he could not identify.
The report was buried. Kristof was discredited. His pension was halved.
Three years ago, Maren had published a story in The Meridian that vindicated every word of his report. The contractor was a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a holding company registered in the Free Port of Kalindra — which, she now understood, was itself a node in the Pelagius Group's sprawling architecture.
Kristof had wept when the story ran. Not from joy. From rage. Vindication, he'd told her, was just grief wearing a better suit.
She knocked on his door at 4:40 a.m. He opened it in thirty seconds, fully dressed, as though he'd been expecting her.
"Voss," he said. Not a question.
"Voss," she confirmed.
He stepped aside and let her in.
The interior of the water tower was a cylinder of screens and silence. Kristof had converted the main floor into a monitoring station where he tracked shipping routes, satellite repositioning schedules, and the digital fingerprints of private military contractors across three continents. He called it his "listening post." His ex-wife had called it his "tomb."
Maren set her airgapped laptop on his desk and opened the file she'd been building for fourteen months. Kristof studied it with the patient intensity of a man reading scripture.
"You've mapped his corporate structure," he said.
"Partially. Seventeen holding companies across nine jurisdictions. Three charitable foundations. Two private banks. And a consulting firm in the Autonomous Zone of Thessaly that appears to do nothing except receive wire transfers and issue them to entities that don't exist."
"What are you missing?"
"The center. Every thread I pull leads to a vanishing point. There's something at the core of his network that I can't identify — a location, an entity, something physical. All roads lead there and then disappear."
Kristof leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. When he spoke, his voice carried the weight of something he had carried alone for too long.
"Meridiane," he said.
Maren frowned. "What is that?"
"It's not a what. It's a where. Or it was. Or it might still be. I don't know. No one does." He pulled up a navigational chart on one of his larger screens — a detailed maritime map of the Kasserine Archipelago, a chain of volcanic islands scattered across eight hundred kilometers of open ocean between the continents of Valderia and South Tessara. The archipelago was sparsely populated, politically fragmented, and largely ignored by the international community.
Kristof zoomed in on a patch of empty ocean between two charted islands.
"Here," he said, pointing at nothing. "Meridiane."
"There's nothing there."
"Exactly. There hasn't been anything there since 2011. Before that, there was an island. Small — maybe four square kilometers. Volcanic origin. It appeared on naval charts from the 1940s through 2008. Then it was removed."
"Islands don't get removed from charts."
"This one did. Simultaneously, from every major maritime database, every satellite imaging archive, every geological survey. I found references to it in a declassified Verentaal naval communication from 1997 — a routine patrol log mentioning a 'private research facility on Meridiane, no approach authorized.' The log was declassified in 2015 as part of a batch release. Six weeks later, it was reclassified. I had already downloaded it."
Maren felt the familiar tightness in her chest that she'd learned to recognize not as fear but as proximity to truth.
"Who owns it?"
"That's the question that ended my career, Maren. Not the communications report. That was the excuse. I started asking about Meridiane in 2014, after I found the patrol log. I submitted queries through official channels. Within three weeks, I was placed on administrative leave. Within three months, I was out."
"For asking about an island."
"For asking about an island that, according to every official record, does not and has never existed."
Six hundred kilometers south, Tomás Duran stood on the deck of a forty-meter motor yacht called the Nereid, watching the coastline of Kalindra recede into morning haze. The yacht belonged to no one — or rather, it belonged to a chain of shell companies so long that the concept of ownership dissolved into abstraction. It was, in practice, a mobile facility operated by the consortium that Voss had served, and that had likely ordered his death.
The woman who had called him — GRENADINE — was aboard. She had not given her real name. She never did. In the seven years Tomás had worked within the Pelagius orbit, he had interacted with GRENADINE perhaps forty times and learned nothing about her except that she was methodical, unhesitating, and operated with an authority that suggested she answered to very few people, if any.
She was in the yacht's lower salon now, reviewing data on a tablet, her face lit by the cold blue glow. She was perhaps fifty, slender, with short silver hair and the kind of stillness that came not from calm but from absolute control.
"The two missing drives," she said without looking up. "Do you have any theory?"
"Voss moved them. Probably weeks before his death."
"Where?"
"If I knew that, you wouldn't need me."
She looked up. Her eyes were the color of wet slate.
"Don't mistake this for a negotiation, Tomás. You are here because you installed the security overlay on the Archen servers. You know the encryption architecture. You know the redundancy protocols. And you know things about Meridiane that make you either an asset or a liability. I am offering you the chance to choose which."
Tomás said nothing. He looked out at the water and thought about the island.
He had been there eleven times. The first visit, in 2016, he had been told it was a corporate retreat — a private facility for high-level meetings away from surveillance and media. This was technically true in the way that calling the ocean "damp" was technically true.
The facility on Meridiane was a world unto itself. Solar-powered, satellite-shielded, staffed by personnel who rotated on six-month contracts and signed agreements that made their silence not just legally but existentially binding. There were residences, conference rooms, a medical wing, a server farm, and areas that Tomás had been explicitly instructed never to enter.
He had entered one of them once.
He had never spoken about what he saw. Not to anyone. Not even to himself, in the private theater of his own mind, where he replayed his worst memories like a penitent cycling through prayers.
Some things were not memories. They were wounds that had learned to think.
"Meridiane is decommissioned," he said carefully. "Voss shut it down in 2019. The facility was dismantled. I supervised the removal of the security infrastructure myself."
"The physical facility, yes. But the network it supported is still operational. The pipelines, the accounts, the access protocols. All still active. All still routing through the same architecture you helped build."
"I built security systems. I didn't build pipelines."
"The distinction is irrelevant. You protected the machine. That makes you part of it."
She set down her tablet and stood. She was shorter than he expected — she always was, every time — but her presence occupied the room the way a blade occupies a wound.
"We are going to Meridiane," she said.
"There's nothing there."
"There is something beneath it. Voss built a secondary archive — a mirror of the Archen servers, buried in the volcanic substrate. Shielded from electromagnetic detection. Accessible only through a physical terminal that requires biometric authentication from two of three designated individuals."
"Who are the three?"
"Voss was one. You are another."
Tomás felt the deck shift beneath his feet, though the sea was calm.
"And the third?"
GRENADINE smiled. It was the first time he had ever seen her do so, and it made him understand, with visceral certainty, that smiling and warmth were entirely unrelated phenomena.
"The third is the reason we're in a hurry."
Back in the water tower, Maren was cross-referencing Kristof's Meridiane data with her own Pelagius files when her second burner phone buzzed. A different unknown number. A different message.
THE ISLAND IS REAL. SOMEONE SURVIVED IT. ALMATHI PORT DISTRICT. THE WOMAN WITH THE BURNED HANDS. FIND HER BEFORE THEY DO.
Maren stared at the message.
The woman with the burned hands.
She looked at Kristof. "I need to get to Almathi."
"Why?"
"Because someone is feeding me a trail, and I'm choosing to follow it."
"That's not a reason. That's a compulsion."
"Maybe. But Kristof — when you asked about Meridiane and they destroyed your career, did you stop?"
He looked at her with eyes that held fifteen years of obsession and loss.
"No," he said.
"Then you understand."
He nodded slowly. "There's a cargo flight from Grenzach to Almathi at 8 a.m. I know the pilot. He won't ask questions, but he'll expect cash."
Maren was already packing her bag.
Behind her, on Kristof's central screen, a satellite image refreshed — a routine pass over the Kasserine Archipelago, showing empty ocean where Meridiane should have been.
But for a single frame — one-thirtieth of a second, a glitch that would be corrected in the next orbital pass — there was a shadow on the water.
Something was there.
Something that the world had agreed, formally and unanimously, did not exist.