Chapter 8 - A DEAD MAN'S BADGE
The name on the contractor badge was Gabriel Voss. The official report said Voss, Lantern's medic, had died beside Mara Quinn at the schoolhouse.
"He carried Jonah when the boy couldn't walk," Olivia said. "I watched Gabriel put him on the riverboat."
"You never saw what happened to Gabriel afterward?" Chen asked.
"No. But if he's alive, I want to know why he never found us."
Chen's team discovered the badge wasn't a genuine current credential. Someone had copied an old identification number into the contractor access system. The man who entered Hale's building had used Voss's dead identity to avoid showing his own.
Hale requested a security review and recused himself from controlling access to evidence. He couldn't investigate his own past decisions.
Two days later, an envelope arrived at the investigator's office through counsel. Inside was a photograph of Gabriel Voss with his arm around Mara, taken beside the schoolhouse before the attack. On its back someone had written, I DIDN'T DIE EITHER.
Chen traced the sender through his lawyer. Voss was alive, recovering from injuries he had never been allowed to explain. After the evacuation he'd been told Olivia was dead. He had changed his name, moved, and lived under the shadow of the same threats that had silenced her.
When they met over a secure video call, his voice broke.
"You held the door," he said.
"You carried the kids."
"Mara gave me copies of convoy numbers before she went back. I kept them all these years. I didn't know who to trust."
"Trust the people examining the records," Chen said. "And give us the originals with their history intact."
Voss nodded. Then his picture froze. An unfamiliar voice came through his microphone.
May you like
"Tell Olivia her nine years are over."
The connection went black.
