Sarah Burks's Arc

Chapter 10 of 13

Sarah spread the photographs across the hood of the leader's truck and pulled out her field notebook. The energy spike data sat in the middle column—precise timestamps, radiation patterns, electromagnetic signatures she'd recorded over two weeks of careful monitoring. Data she'd shared with exactly one person. She placed the first warehouse photograph beside her notes. The angle matched perfectly. Whoever took this picture had been standing at the same monitoring point she'd used last Tuesday. The leader picked up the photograph and studied it in silence. Sarah flipped to the next page and found the radiation spike from 0347 hours—the same spike visible as a faint shimmer in the warehouse photo's background. Her throat went dry. She pulled the brick from her pack and extracted the flash drive, the one she'd given the leader three days ago containing every measurement. The leader's expression didn't change, but Sarah saw the calculation happening. Only two people had access to this data. Sarah turned back to the photographs and found what she'd been dreading—a shot of the factory's east wall taken at the exact timestamp of her third monitoring session. The camera had captured her silhouette in the frame's corner. Whoever had been watching hadn't just copied her data. They'd been tracking her. The leader opened the back of the filing cabinet they'd brought from the warehouse and pulled out a strip of photograph negatives. Sarah held them up to the morning light. Each negative showed her at a different monitoring location, always from a distance, always from an angle that suggested professional surveillance training. The leader's voice cut through her analysis: "Someone's been following you since before you came to us." Sarah's mind raced through the implications. The hidden subway occupant hadn't been monitoring the vault. They'd been monitoring her. Sarah met the leader's eyes and made her choice. She pulled out every remaining page of her field notes and laid them flat on the truck hood—monitoring schedules, equipment calibrations, planned descent routes she hadn't shared yet. Everything. The leader watched her without speaking. Sarah's hands steadied as she explained each page, each pattern, each decision that had led her to the Atomic Cats. If someone had been tracking her this closely, the only way forward was complete transparency. No more calculated trust. The leader listened to every word, then gathered the notes and locked them in the cabinet. "Tomorrow we compare my security logs to your monitoring times. If they've been following you, they've left traces." The partnership had shifted. Sarah was no longer proving her value. She was helping hunt whoever had compromised them both.