Cain you feel the heat?

@azurePond 

Note - Cain was the hardest to write. I created him, but I hate him—every word, every lie, every tremor he faked. He’s not a mystery—he’s a mask, and I want readers to see through it. Also, if Pine Tree ever comes across this story... I’m sorry that Cain burned down your relatives’ home. We will seek revenge soon. Thank you.

Content Warning: This story contains references to violence, arson, psychological manipulation, substance abuse, child endangerment and emotional abuse. It includes themes of moral ambiguity, family dysfunction, and PTSD. Also, everything is fictional in this story. Please do not sue me.

Chapter 2 : Adam’s Original Sin

The alert chimed at  5 :35 am as I reviewed the Singapore contract—another shell game hiding a lithium supplier’s sins. The LLC traced back to a PO box in the Caymans, same one linked to a 2018 cobalt mine collapse in the Congo. The paperwork smelled like bergamot and hubris—the ambassador’s cologne. I wondered if he’d used the same pen to sign orphanage donations.
I didn’t spend three years at Columbia Law to draft fire clauses and hush contracts, but here we are.

Red Alert. The kind reserved for family– reserved for Abigail and Cain. My siblings.

Franko’s message came through. He was the one tracking the dead-drop server for Cain’s operation.
       
     Blue Dust op. Montana. Wildfire. One survivor. Cain Manuel Rutherford. 

I stopped breathing. Just long enough to feel the old, familiar crackle in my chest—the one that always comes when Cain’s name and the word “survivor” end up in the same sentence. I opened the attachments: Cain’s button cam footage, a satellite feed looping the blaze frame by frame. And there it was—what used to be a boot. Melted beyond use but the chip? GPS. High grade Titanium. Engraved on the casing: CMR.

That chip is going to be a problem.

I’d paid six figures to have that chip embedded—military spec, not that discount grade crap you slap on PMC cowboys. But the kind that was designed for Tier One operators. The kind they use in wet zones where bodies are hard to recover. Cain had left it behind like a rookie. My little brother used to be more careful than that.

So I called the one person who could cover up a fire without leaving the smoke —our CEO, Genevieve "Ginny" Bass, the one who had sent Cain out there in the first place..

““Adam” she said cutting straight to the point. “Franko sent me the info 20 minutes ago.  Get my Jetstream ready; pre-clearance is already in progress. Keep me updated and I’ll handle the press. I’ll spin this as a meth lab explosion—focus on the amateurs. No mention of Cain…not yet at least. The Montana senator’s office will talk up local drug ties. We’ll keep the feds out of it, at least for now.”

Her voice was cold, direct. Ginny wasn’t asking for cooperation, she was taking control. She’d manage the narrative, use the explosion as a smokescreen and drag the Montana senator into the mess—exactly what the Clients wanted. It was classic Ginny—reframe, redirect and leverage the system.

“Got it.” I hung up and dialed Lydia.

“Freeze the trust. Get Ginny’s Gulfstream ready. And pull everything on Sheriff Kent—finances, connections, history. I want a full, clean dossier.”
She cut the line. Actions first. The old woman’s still adept like that.

Meanwhile, my mind replayed what must’ve gone down. He’d charm those amateur meth cooks. Then he’d plant the camera, transmit the coordinates. But the fire? That wasn’t in the playbook.That was Cain going off-script.

Thing is, Cain doesn’t just burn things—he performs fire. Only when it fits the scene. Only when there is a trigger. Only when he’s playing to some invisible crowd, convinced he’s owed their awe.

But the Montana blaze—that wasn’t all him. Cain lit the match…. the wind, the chemicals, the dry pine, the heatwave—those did the rest. Forces out there even Cain can’t control. I used to joke that he was a control freak with a lighter. Now, I don’t joke.  I just pay the insurance premiums and PR donations.



Three hours later, I was airborne over the Midwest. The cabin hummed with a low, steady thrum—like a tired heart at rest. Overhead, the ceiling twinkled faintly, mimicking a starfield. Near the minibar, a backlit panel glowed: I find your lack of data... disturbing.
Just above it, two crayon drawings hung in neat black frames—spaceships, stick figures, and bursts of color signed in crooked block letters: Desi and Jack.
Of course Ginny Bass flew in a Star Wars jet—luxury, nerd chic and two kids’ drawings to prove she was still someone’s mom.

 My laptop’s glare cut through the soft ambience. On screen: Cain’s button cam, shaky and grainy, timestamp 21:47:03.

“Wait for Troy.. He will decide what do with the hiker–”
“—five stars, rustic ambiance–” Cain’s voice crackled, all charm and danger.
On screen, a guy leaned in, his face a roadmap of bad decisions.
“You are not even funny.”
The camera jerked—Cain’s hand brushing the second button… killing the feed.
I rewound. Played it again. There it was–

“You are not even funny.”

A new email pinged—Genevieve Bass.
“Montana went well. Clients said the fire showed adaptability. Let’s aim for the same in Caracas. May the force be with you.”

I sighed. Adaptability. That’s what they called setting people on fire now. Also Caracas? Ginny knew what exactly happened there the last time. I couldn’t tell if it was blind faith in the Force or just strategic amnesia.

I typed back: No Caracas.
Her reply came within seconds. Okay.

Just that. No pushback. No questions.
Like agreeing to skip lunch. Like it hadn’t broken us the first time.

Lydia’s voice crackled over the intercom. “Ten minutes to landing.”

I leaned back, jaw tight.
Aim for the same.

2019.  Caracas. Cain’s first sanctioned kill. My original sin.  A cartel financier with blood money on his hands—child soldiers, chemical stockpiles, the works. It was a clean hit. Until the financier’s little brother—came running in. Cain froze. Just for a moment. That moment got seared into both of us. We torched the apartment. Called it collateral. The coroner listed the boy as ‘unidentified male, 8-12 years.’ Ginny paid to have the report buried. Cain never forgot.

By ten, I’d already done the cleanup—laid out what Lydia flagged. So when Sheriff Kent finally called at 10:17 am, I was ready. His voice finally crackled through the satellite line, as gravelly and tired as the land he patrolled.

“You the brother?”
“I’ve been accused of worse.”
He didn’t laugh. That’s fine. I was not going to set a Pine forest on fire over this.
“Your brother’s story about hiking doesn’t add up.”
“Neither will your budget next quarter if you push this. Bass Strategic Holdings– ring a bell?” Pause. ““Charge him and I leak your deputy’s body cam ketamine reel. Say goodbye to your third run and that future Senate seat’”

Silence. Then…  “My brother. Loves. Hiking.” I enunciated.

“He accidently  burned half of the damn forest.”

“And the meth supply you ignored. You’re welcome.”

By the time I pulled up to the station, I was running on caffeine, spite and recycled jet air. My eyes felt like sandpaper. I parked crooked. Cain sat on the curb, cigarette in hand and borrowed cheap boots. Looked up like I was late to a meeting we hadn’t scheduled. At least I made it before noon. 11:58 am.

“Well. Well” he said squinting through the smoke. “Look what the moral high ground dragged in.”

He climbed in without argument. Just silence.

Five minutes into the drive, he broke it.

“She laughed at my joke.”

I didn’t bite.

“Woman outside the station this morning. I said…  ‘I’m not crazy, just laughing ’cause it’s either that or burn another pine forest.’ She laughed.”

I glanced sideways. “That’s  your metric for stability now?”

He shrugged, half smiling. "Abby says it counts."

Of course Abby would say that. Abigail’s always been the peacekeeper — the youngest one holding the house together. Honestly, more unhinged than both of us, with all that idealism and Gen Z humour. If she found out Fordy actually torched a pine forest, she’d show up swinging, banners flying. And Fordy? He’d set them — and her — on fire without blinking.

I tossed the laptop into his lap. “Timestamp 21:47”

He didn’t flinch. “Already saw the highlight reel that Ginny send me”

“You sent coordinates before the fire. Like I told you on the phone earlier, the fire was an overkill. Why did you do it?”

Cain lit another cigarette. “Added incentive,” he said flicking the White Rabbit Motel matchbook like it was supposed to impress me.

“Bullsh!t. You torched four men and a damn forest because some guy said you weren’t funny.”

Silence.

“You’re thirty three, not some kid messing around with a matchbook

Silence again.

Then quietly, he said: “ Five men. Troy, their head  was on his way. He was supposed to decide if I was going to live or not. Joke’s on him.”

“Don’t.” I gripped the wheel. “That classroom, now the pine—”

“Don’t.” His voice sharpened. “You don’t get to weaponize the classroom incident . She was not in her right mind.”

Yes. SHE was the one not in the right mind. The road blurred. Aria’s face flickered in my mind—her trembling hands.

“They were amateurs” Cain muttered. “Couldn’t even tie a proper knot.” He shoved his wrists forward—raw burns, skin peeling like old paint. “But that guy – he looked at me like I was nothing. A punchline without a setup.”

I glanced over. His dimples were gone, eyes flat as a gutted blade.

“You know what happens when people don’t laugh, Addy?”

“They walk away,Fordy.”

“No.” He exhaled smoke, the ember glowing like a dying star. “They burn.”

And that’s the thing about Cain. He says stuff like that—makes you feel guilty and angry at the same time.

We weren’t always like this.
I handled the law. Cain handled chaos.  And Ginny handled the rest. A well oiled machine… if you like your machines blood-slicked and morally ambiguous.

Then came Aria.

If Caracas was the Original Sin, then Aria was the Mark of Cain — my lingering sin.

A Jersey born poet with  a soft spot for feral cats and a caffeine addiction that rivaled mine. She taught English in South Side Chicago, quoted Neruda at breakfast and fell in love with Cain—not for who he was, but for who she thought he could be. She saw something in him. God help us, he tried to live up to it….for a few months.
Until she found out about Oaxaca. Or was it Prague?
She just ran. Cain caught her unwillingly.
Then one day she packed her bags and snuck out. Cain burned her classroom. The kids were on a field trip. No one was hurt. Except Aria.

We buried it ofcourse– under paperwork—a “faulty heater” , a generous insurance claim. Gave her a new name. A new passport. A new job. I moved her to Scotland—quiet village, good school, sea air. She started teaching again.

I visited once.
Not as Adam Williams Rutherford, just someone from the "education board."
She looked smaller. Tired. That fireproof sadness people carry long after the flames die out.
That was the first time I saw the scars. Faint, almost forgotten. Just old memories her body hadn’t let go of. Her hands trembled when she poured tea. She smiled too fast, like silence might be punished.

That was the first time I wondered if we were monsters.

I told Cain what happened. He didn’t ask where or when. He never tried to find her again. But sometimes, I’d catch him in bookstores, trailing his fingers over poetry spines like they were relics. His stories about her shift every time—sometimes she’s the one who lost her grip, sometimes she never really loved him. The truth morphs depending on the audience. Maybe just whatever makes it easier to get through the next job. Cain has done monstrous things for the sake of those jobs. And I’ve used them. Every. Single. One. Including Aria.

The drive to the airstrip was suffocatingly quiet. Cain tossed a protein bar onto my lap—the kind Abby always had instead of breakfast. Nutritious, bland. Maybe a peace offering. Maybe just muscle memory. I left it unopened on the console.

The jet’s engines idled with a low industrial whine. Lydia sat slumped in the cabin, her boots propped on a dented Pelican case. The tablet on her knees displayed a thermal map of the burn zone—just blotchy red gradients and elevation grids. A takeout container of mango sat beside her, stabbed through with a plastic fork.

Cain collapsed into a seat, his borrowed boots scraping the floor.
“You’re like… Alfred. If Alfred shopped at Harbor Freight and had a 401(k)” His voice rasped… all gravel and nicotine.

Lydia didn’t glance up. “And you’re like a raccoon that learned to light matches. Sit down before I duct tape you to the bulkhead, Fordy.”
Cain laughed. The tension dissipated. For now.

A streak of silver in her braid caught the cabin light as Lydia turned to me.
“Addy, you always say this is the last shady thing.”
I peeled off my jacket. “And I always tell you… Aunt Lydia.”
She gave me that look, half fond, half exasperated, already regretting the Addy and Fordy bit.
“Hey… nicknames go both ways” I said. “You don’t have to keep doing this. You don’t owe my parents anymore.”
She exhaled, thumb hovering over a satellite overlay.
“Yeah. Well. I do. So shut up and eat your damn mango.”

I’d just stabbed a piece of mango when the sat phone buzzed.

Ginny.
All smooth so far?

Then:
Is Cain okay? Tried calling—no answer. Might need to sit the next one out. Maybe talk to someone. Flagging it.

Replied : Got it. I’ll check.

I watched Cain for a moment, taking in the patchwork of burns on his left ear and right hand, the hasty bandages from the ranger station.

"You good?" I asked.

He didn’t answer. I pulled out my phone and texted Ginny to have a doctor ready when we landed.

Cain was staring past the cabin window, out at the smoldering horizon—somewhere far off.

“You ever wonder if she’s still writing?” he asked.

This time, I didn’t answer.

One quiet breath passed. My stomach reminded me it was already 1 pm—I hadn’t eaten a proper lunch. I was just about to stand when my phone buzzed again—another alert from Franko.

Mexico. A lithium spill. Whistleblower missing.

Appendix C of the Singapore contract flickered in my mind: “environmental contingencies” in Sonora. Eight paragraphs later: a $3M indemnity for “fire mitigation.” 

I gazed at Cain.  He exhaled smoke. And somewhere in Sonora, the next fire was already waiting. This is the last time I told myself. I’ll use him as a weapon—once more.

Then I’ll give Lydia her retirement. Then I’ll put him down. And then, I’ll put myself down.

This is a fictional story. You know, like a  made up story. Please don't sue me.

Chapter 3 : “The Righteous are Shadowbanned” - Book of Abigail
It was a chill Sunday morning, you know, the usual stuff– friends, pizza and casually screen-recording flaming highways to h3ll.  Arlene, Ben and I had been going through Y0uTube clips of last week’s Montana forest fire—shaky helicopter footage, a T!kT0k of flames vaulting over the Highway in the early morning, some kid’s live stream commentary
“ bruh the vibes are apocalyptic!’
as  pine trees got ratioed by fire emojis.
“We’re losing the plot” Arlene said rewinding the same two seconds of scorched treetops. My ginger cat, Tart, batted a USB drive into the half eaten pizza. He’s named after Tartini, the Italian composer. Not the French sandwich. And Definitely, Not after tort, as in Civil Court Dramas

“Everyone’s dunking on the senator’s ‘investigation.’ Our angle’s here.” Arlene froze the frame: a lone ponderosa, bark split open like a peeled nerve. “The loss of an ecosystem… the loss of life–  That is our angle, not the trend and certainly not the scandal.”
My dad’s old flip phone footage played on my laptop—a volunteer planting day, his hands caked in mud as he explained to little Addy and little Fordy why you never plant saplings in straight lines. “Forests need chaos, kids.”
Ben snorted. “Your voiceover’s gonna sound like a T3D Talk.” He dragged in audio of wind screaming through dead branches—scraped from a hiker’s ASMR channel. 
Then Nate barged in, his thrifted leather jacket smelling of rain and smoke. His silver shark-tooth necklace swung as he tossed a flash drive to Ben.
“Got it from a source at the docks. Tankers with no markings, midnight shipments. Needs a techie touch.”
Ben caught it, raising an eyebrow. “You pay them?”
“Trade secrets” Nate grinned. “Told them I’d name my firstborn ‘TerraMax’ if they lied.”
I rolled my eyes. “You don’t want kids.”
“And TerraMax doesn’t want this footage. Win-win.”

The footage wasn’t dramatic. It was at least a month old. No mutant turtles or neon ooze. Just a time lapse of evaporation ponds—wide, shallow basins that slowly filled up over days, fed by tankers with no markings. Lithium spill. I noted. The leaders ask you to use paper straws to save the planet—then pump lithium into your water supply.
So we did what we always  do, we opened our Inst@gram profile…
The @slowdisclosure bio called itself “a burial site for crimes too boring to trend.”
Arlene had coined the tagline after their third post—a 20 minute deep dive on soil erosion in Nebraska—garnered 67 views and one comment: “this cured my insomnia.”  Our followers hovered around 1,615ish…  mostly grad students, underpaid NGO staffers and a suspicious cluster of accounts named things like @BigLithiumStan69 and @IdrinkPetrolNotCoffee
The page wasn’t meant to go viral.( Hello fox, meet the sour grapes).
The page was a ledger. Ben’s macros of microplastics woven into seagrass roots. Arlene’s annotated threads tracing shell subsidiaries through Mauritius tax havens. Nate’s shaky drone shots of pipeline protests where the chants blurred into white noise. Our most engaged post ever was a reel of a disoriented oil coated seagull stumbling into a “Clean Energy Now!” billboard. Nate had captioned it: “Corporate synergy.” Arlene retrofitted it with a JSTOR link about avian mortality rates. It got 27k  likes. Mostly thanks to the seagull's stupidity. And the rest thanks to the  Swifties who piggybacked on the reel’s song choice - I had too much to drink tonight excerpt - from Nothing New ( Drunk Taylor’s Version) . There were also snorkeling reels where Percy explained coral bleaching shirtless. His abs got us likes. Mostly from other straight men—but that was the point. Someone had to reach out to that demographic.

Now, hunched over Ben’s laptop, we trimmed the Sonora Spill footage—tankers trickling brine into ponds, sped up until the waterline rose like a silent scream. I suggested a caption about “slow violence.” Nate argued for “When your ESG report is a burn book.” Ben split the difference: “Day 287 of watching capitalism cosplay sustainability (Sound on for crickets.)”
Arlene glared. “Crickets?”
“Poetic juxtaposition.”
“They’re extinct in Sonora since the pesticides.”
Ben deleted the caption.

But I wanted to make sure that it was legal to post it, a reflex action when you have a lawyer brother—or you can call it paranoia. So I called Addy aka Adam,  my elder brother.
“Hey,” I said. “Hypothetical question.”
“If someone posts drone footage that implies environmental damage tied to a company, can they get sued?”
Pause. “Hypothetically?”
“Yeah.”
“Is the footage real?”
“Obviously.”
“Is it defamatory?”
“Define defamatory?”
“Abby.”
“Okay okay—no names, no direct accusations. Just... Sonora spill. Vague enough.”
More silence.
“Just tell me if I’m gonna get sued and/or kidnapped.”
“You’re fine…” he said finally, voice clipped. “Technically. Just don’t be stupid. These companies? They’ve got lawyers who eat breakfast off community guideline loopholes.”
“Comforting.” I muttered.
“It’s not sinister. It’s capitalism.”
“Okay, Bruce Wayne.”
He snorted. “Just don’t post anything you can’t walk back.”
That didn’t make me feel better.
Still, we posted the footage.

Then like after four or five hour the glitches started.
Not the cool kind, either. Not hacker gloves and green code. Just a sudden freeze while I was mid-scrolling. Inst@gram threw up an “Action Blocked” warning when I tried to post a story about lithium mining. Like I’d tried to sell counterfeit Crocs or something. And nonsense emails from the sites. Also the algorithm was filled with Crypto ads and porno.
I thought it was a bug.
“Shadowbanning.” Ben said not looking up. “They’re not deleting us. They’re starving us. Burying us. Congrats—we are now digital Cassandras.”
I’d heard of it. Climate activists, creators, even biologists who posted too many melting glaciers or oil rigs—some of them had warned us before. “Sudden drop in engagement.” “Story views mysteriously tanking.” But I figured that only happened to the big accounts. The ones with press passes and blue ticks.
Still, our Sonora Spill post barely cracked 9 views. No comments. Not even a troll. It just died.
Nate paced, his boots leaving scuff marks on the floor.
“This is why I dropped out of J school. Professors kept whining about ‘objectivity’ while the planet burned.” He thumbed his press pass, still tucked in his wallet from his last gig.
“Cross post it. If Inst@gram censors, we go guerrilla. My subst@ck’s got only 307 followers, but one’s a Times editor who owes me for that alpaca story.”

So I tried cross posting.

Ben squinted at the screen. “Inst@gram’s flagging ‘community guidelines’ . T!kT0k says ‘unverified claims,’ LinkdIn called it ‘inflammatory.’” He scrolled.
“No coordinated timestamp—T!kT0k acted first, then the others followed after it started gaining traction.”
“Classic herd moderation. Algorithms piggybacking off each other’s risk assessments.” Arlene sighed.
I stared. “So who pulled it?”
He hesitated. “Governments maybe. Fortune 50 legal teams. Or—” He tapped the screen, dry. “Crisis firms.”
That’s when the weird feeling hit—a slow, nauseous tilt, like the floorboards had slipped a half inch sideways.

Because I know someone in a crisis firm. Adam. My brother worked for Bass Strategic Holdings. Addy is the one I called for legal advice—the same guy who talked me out of suing my slumlord sophomore year. “Not worth the discovery process, Abby” he’d said sipping black coffee like it was a deposition. Wore pressed suits to brunch, called corporate scandals “narrative turbulence.”
And still, it was Addy who gave me Dad’s old flip phone—all the voicemails, videos, everything. It was the night Fordy joked that Dad probably planted trees just to offset the family’s carbon footprint. I laughed, then cried, then said I didn’t have any memories of dad. Addy didn’t say a word that night. But the next morning he just slid the box across the counter.

“Coordinates don’t exist” Ben’s voice cut through my thoughts. “But the shell corp’s tax filings? Classic TerraMax. Reminds me of that ‘organic’ landfill they built over the wetlands.” Ben’s fingers paused over the keyboard, the glow of the screen reflecting in his glasses—the same pair he’d worn since high school, when he and I built a (disastrous) solar powered WiFi router for our sustainability workshop. His NASA hoodie sleeve rode up, revealing a faded scar from the time we accidentally set fire to his garage testing homemade biodiesel.
I snorted. “You mean the one Percy called ‘capitalist compost’?”
Ben’s lips twitched. “He’s still bitter.”
“Yeah, TerraMax. Fitting name — they do the max when it comes to screwing over the planet” Nate grumbled over our conversation.

“Sustainable Land Innovation grant” Arlene announced, voice sharp. “Denied. But three months ago…” She zoomed in on the fine print. “Disaster relief clause. Sound familiar?”
Arlene leaned over her laptop, her pastel pink nail polish clicking against the keys. She’d always been meticulous—I remembered how she’d dissected my arguments in our college debate semifinal, coldly dismantling  my case for “ethical mining” with a single EPA report.
“They’re laundering wildfires” Arlene said. “Just like you tried to defend in our sophomore year.”
“I was naive.”  I muttered.
“We all were.”

“Okay.”  Ben said, after two hours of intense silence and keyboard clacks. “Your video wasn’t just flagged. It was soft blacklisted. A ‘priority suppression’ packet was triggered—this is backend level.”
“Backend?”
“Like... someone inside the system told it to erase you
He frowned. “The suppression packet? It’s masked. But the moderation ID tag here—GNT-AWR—.matches a takedown string I saw in those leaked moderation protocols from the BSH union busting leak. Same structure. Same hash format.”
He hesitated. “But Abby… this could just be a template. Like… maybe TerraMax hired Bass for PR control and Bass used their standard takedown protocol.”

BSH.  Bass Strategic Holdings was  just a sleek gray tower downtown where rich celebrities paid to have their dumpster fires repackaged as “learning moments.” Addy once turned a popstar’s alpaca ranch coke bust into a “wellness retreat” story. I’d laughed then stopped when I realized he wasn’t joking. But  Bass Strategic’s client list wasn’t just celebrities, it seems.
Last year, at Addy’s grudgingly attended the office Christamas party, I’d met Ginny Bass herself—CEO, mother of twins (dragons), the feminist icon and the woman behind Sustainability as a Superpower– the T3D Talk I’d streamed three times during finals week. She’d gripped my hand, her smile sharp but warm. “Abby! The tidepool warrior. Keep making good trouble.”
Then, sotto voice: “Just don’t go full Dark Side on us.”
A wink, a Star wars quote and she’d pivoted to schmooze a senator.

Now staring at Ben’s screen—GNT-AWR, the suppression tag—I felt sweat prickle my neck.
Last week. Addy and Fordy missed Dad’s death anniversary.
Work emergency, Addy said. Big client.
The same week TerraMax buried the spill.
Now Ben’s screen blinks: GNT-AWR.
Bass Strategic’s suppression tag.
Unless…
“You okay? I know how much you–” Ben talked, eyeing my death grip on the desk.
“I’m fine.” I interrupted him.

Ginny’s  quote flashing in my head—“The Force isn’t magic. It’s the grind of choices that add up.” But Ginny Bass wasn’t Lex Luthor or in this case, Darth Vader. She donated to reef restoration NGOs. Her twins’ birthday party had a “zero waste lightsaber” theme. She’d liked my post about microplastic eating bacteria last April.
And accusing Ginny Bass—sustainability’s patron saint of LinkdIn—of greenwashing genocide? That wasn’t a reel you posted without ironclad proof. That was the kind of theory that got you institutionalized, or worse, ratioed by a CEO’s PR team.

But the coordinates didn’t lie. The shell companies. The crickets Arlene said were extinct.
“Can you prove it? Can you prove BSH is behind the cover up” I asked.
“Not in court. But yeah—it was them. Someone high up saw it. Killed it before it snowballed.”
My stomach turned.

I thought about the way Addy had paused on the phone. How fast he’d said “technically fine” but warned me off. Like he’d already seen it coming.
So I called Addy…again.
“I know who pulled my post,” I said.
Silence.
“Your firm. BSH. Someone with clearance wiped it before anyone even reacted.”
He exhaled. “That’s not how it works.”
“That’s not a denial.”
“I didn’t do it.”
“Did you know it would happen?”
Pause. “Not exactly.”
“But you weren’t surprised.”
“No” he admitted. “We handle fallouts.”
“So you buried it.”
“I didn’t bury anything,” he snapped. I said nothing.
“Abby—come on.” Addy’s voice stayed flat lawyer calm. “Where do you think the money comes from? You and your friends get to hang out in San Aurelio, film turtles, go viral—and who’s quietly covering your tour expenses, your rent, your groceries, your last minute vet bill, even your internet bill ?  Me. I bankroll your little activism stunts. I am not the enemy here. I raised you and…..”

It stung. Because he wasn’t lying.
Addy did raise me. Not in the bedtime stories way, but in the “happy birthday” calls I didn’t expect, the emergency wire transfers when the fridge was empty, the career pep talks when I was two bad nights away from dropping everything. He showed up. Quietly. Reliably.
But he also let my voice get deleted.
I didn’t say anything. I just hung up.
.
.

.

(Continued in the comments)

⚠️ TW: This story contains depictions and references to child abuse, death, gaslighting, war and PTSD as well as themes of emotional manipulation and psychological trauma. It also includes content involving family conflict, institutional power dynamics and mental health struggles. All characters and events are entirely fictional, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Chapter 4 : The Book of Openings

"She posted it, didn’t she?"
The words slipped out, riding the cigarette smoke curling off my lip. I flicked the butt into a rain slick gutter outside Bass Strategic Holdings' glass cathedral of an office. It hissed like it was scared of me. Good.

Adam didn’t answer immediately. He just sipped his black coffee like it was part of a closing statement. Navy suit, silver cufflinks and that thousand yard lawyer stare that could redact your existence and file it under "unfortunate misunderstanding."
"So?"
"So it’s been shadowbanned across four platforms." he said calmly. "And Ginny’s... aware."
I groaned, slow and theatrical.  " Ginny’s awareness is a kill switch."
"Fordy. Abby’s a kid. Our little sister. Don’t."
I turned. Real slow. Let the chill bite through my jacket.
"No. You don’t get to say my name like it’s a leash."

He didn’t flinch. He never does. That’s Addy. Emotionally waterproof. The kind of guy who could watch Rome burn, write the insurance claim and still make it to his little sister’s recital.
"She didn’t name TerraMax but it doesn’t take a genius. GNT-AWR got triggered. They had used the same suppression tag from the union bust leak. But here's the kicker: Abby was tagged before the post even went live. BSH had predictive behavioral models on half the activist scene but Franko was sloppy with the tags. Should have replaced them. But then again, Abby was not on the red list."
"Which means " I said stepping closer, voice low  " you want me to go play soft cop again. The charming lunatic. The biblical Cain."
"You gave yourself that name."
"It’s called branding, Adam. What was I supposed to do with Caelum? It’s like naming your kid Lucifer and acting shocked when he sets things on fire."
"Caelum meant sky.” He paused and then sharp like a surgeon’s scalpel. “ Mother wanted you to fly."
"And they named you Adam. Earthbound. Solid. You really think this system wasn’t rigged from the start?"
He exhaled into his coffee. Didn’t say it but I could feel it:
Just don’t burn anything this time, Cain.
End of the brotherly heart-to-heart.

The first time I went into Abby's apartment, I used the spare key she forgot I had. The apartment used to be mine and Addy's when we were in our twenties, pretending to be adults. Then Addy gave it to Abby when she got into college. Technically, some of my cr@p still lived in the spare room—my punching bag, old coats… She was at the kitchen table, surrounded by spreadsheets, cracked USBs and enough caffeine to raise the dead. War room vibes. Tartine, her cat, hissed when I stepped in. Smart creature. But lame name. Only Abby would name her cat after a sandwich.
"You eat today?" I asked, leaning on the fridge like I owned the place. Technically, I do.
"You moving the stuff?" she asked without looking up.
"Yeah. Just the important things."
She waved a hand. "Leave the rest, Fordy. Crash here sometimes when Addy’s world gets too soul dead. He can be boring. And boredom? That’s  worse than chaos."
I popped open a ginger beer and leaned against the kitchen counter.
"Funny. Dad used to say forests need chaos."  She looked up sharply. Not angry—just caught off guard.  She never really knew him. So she loved him. He died when she was still a baby. But I know she’s seen the old tapes.
"Yeah" she said quietly. "And then Addy got that eco award at seven. Everyone clapped when he planted five trees for his school project."A smile curled at the edge of her mouth, but it didn’t reach her eyes.
"Now his office has framed pictures of that moment—like it’s proof he’s still planting anything but paperwork."

That’s the thing with Addy—he never gets his hands dirty anymore. Just delegates. Sends someone else to tidy the mess, smooth the headlines, make it all palatable. Now hes sent me to clean up Abby. Not with bleach or a burner phone but with charm. Damage control. The human kind. Because that’s what I am in their files: an asset. Not the violent kind. The persuasive kind. The one who can show up with a bruised jaw, a dark joke and a charming smile—and flip a narrative before it catches flame.
The irony? I used to set fires. Real ones. Back when we still wore uniforms and called it "signal distraction." When flame was language. When noise meant help. When I still believed that if I lit something up loud enough, someone would come. Now they pay me to douse fires I didn't start. Fires like Abby.

So I showed up.

When I unlocked the door and stepped in, I knew something was off. Abby wasn’t the same. She had that spreadsheet sick look—the kind people get when they’ve seen the backend of a system they thought was built on truth, not leverage. I held out the chocolates like a peace offering. Made the usual joke about suing Hulk. No one laughed. Not even her. Nate stood nearby, arms crossed, trying to look casual but hovering like a bodyguard with a press badge. Arlene was noisily peeling gum wrappers one after the other like she needed something to shred. Ben wouldn’t even meet my eye.

Then Abby came at me.

I didn’t lie—just danced around it. Not enough to be obvious, just enough to muddy the waters. Enough for her to maybe think Addy really was helping her. Enough for her to believe I didn’t know what BSH was doing behind the scenes. That I was still the clueless, older sibling who brought snacks and top tier jokes, not a soft spoken cleaner sent in to keep her from blowing it all up or bl0w her up if necessary.

When she finally snapped, it took everything I had—and Addy’s promise of a future gig—to not snap back. I’m flagged off fieldwork after the Pine fireworks. Ginny now thinks I need therapy.

But Abby knows how to find my exact nerve. So I asked about Percy. Classic sidestep. She saw right through it. And honestly? I’ve always disliked Percy. More than I disliked Nate. Percy never fell for my charm—and I’m good at what I do, so that was always a red flag. His military dad was worse. Old accounts. One day, I’m going to light that ledger on fire.

Then I picked up the chocolate box—the one Addy had picked out for Abby, the same one she’d set down back on the counter without a word—and brought it with me as I walked over to the Climate warriors — the privileged  kids with loud opinions, sharper attitudes and a desperate need for attention.  I stretched out on the armrest like I belonged there—which, let’s be honest, I kind of do.

Silence.

“Tartine” I called as the cat jumped up on the table, tail flicking like she had opinions. “Still hates me?”
“It’s Tartini, actually” Arlene corrected gently with that rehearsed kindergarten teacher smile. She was all pink, French braid and lip gloss—the kind of girl who probably colour codes her emotions. “Like Martini.”
“Of course.” I muttered, flipping a chocolate onto the table. “So... Abby’s in her room?”
“She’s not coming out” Ben replied  arms crossed over his NASA hoodie like he was trying to invent a wall. The glasses didn’t help. Kid’s been squinting at screens since he was four. I used to ruffle his hair when he wore dinosaur pajamas. Now he looks at me like I’m the one who put the meteor in the sky.
“Well, she’ll come out when it’s time for dinner” I said setting the box down. “Brought chocolates. Abby’s favorite—the Belgian ones she always nerds out about.”
I opened the lid and held it out. “Peace offering.”
Nate reached in first. Didn’t even glance at the box. “Neuhaus” he muttered like muscle memory as he took one and slipped it straight into his pocket. Didn’t eat it. But did mutter a thanks.
Arlene followed, choosing one with a small smile. “Thanks” she said, unwrapping it neatly and popping it into her mouth without a second thought.
Ben looked at the box for a moment, then at me. He picked out a praline, paused like he might ask something—but didn’t. Just ate it quietly and went back to crossing his arms.

“I didn’t come here to fight” I said, flashing them the version of my smile people usually applaud. “I came to offer snacks and slightly above average banter.”
Nate didn’t buy it. He leaned against the counter, all faux casual, press pass energy.
“Funny timing.” I looked at him like I hadn’t already G00gled his last three internships.
“Is it?”
Arlene patted Tartini like the cat was a coping mechanism. “We were just about to head out anyway.”
“You don’t have to—”
“No really” she smiled. “It’s late. And she... probably wants space.” Arlene went oover and knocked at Abby’s door.
Ben hovered a second longer then gave me a look. Not angry, just disappointed. “Fordy… be nice.”
“I’m always nice” I said, which is technically true. They filed out without drama, just tension and politeness in coats. Nate didn’t even say goodbye. Arlene gave me a soft “Goodnight and thanks for the chocolate” like a closing note on a warning label.

After they left, I crashed in the spare room. The place still looked like a museum of my past—faded posters of Bruce Lee and my old punching bag, half deflated with a duct tape patch from when I put my elbow through it. The mattress sagged but I slept anyway. Years of fieldwork teach you to fall asleep anywhere.
At 7:04 am I woke up to violence. Not yelling. Not doors. Strings. Abby was on the violin, going full scorched earth. Notes slashed through the walls like knives. Not playing—attacking. Sawing. Trying to light the damn thing on fire through friction. Vivaldi. Of course. “Summer” from Four Seasons—her go to war cry. She always did think she was some kind of Bond villain and Vivaldi was her lair music. Which meant she wasn’t just mad. She was furious. Then—snap.

Silence.

I sat up.

A second later came the crash.
Not clumsy. Not impulsive.
The violin Addy gave her—the handcrafted German one with the pearl inlay and the case that cost more than my first car—hit the wall hard enough to leave a dent.
That wasn’t music.
That was Abby firing a warning shot.
The first one.

I chuckled.


When she left for her run—always the same route, same playlist— I did what I was trained to do. Subtle sabotage. One backup file, gone. Quietly. No empty folders, no system alert. Just... gone. I swapped the USB on her desk with one from my own pocket. Almost identical. Same weight. Slightly slicker surface barely noticeable unless you were looking for it—and of course she would be. It wasn’t erasure. It was erosion. And erosion works slower but deeper. Self doubt is a beautiful kind of acid. Makes the smartest people start second guessing reality.

Then I left for a walk. Lit a trash bin behind my building. Stale papers, some printouts, a handful of shredded notes. Watched them burn. Just needed the heat. The sound. That pop and hiss. Reminds me I’m still real. Still here. Still in control. Fire’s funny like that—destructive, yes, but honest. Everything else? Smoke and mirrors.

When Abby got back, hair damp, shoes muddy, she paused at her desk. She looked at the USB. Picked it up. Turned it in her fingers once, twice. I caught the twitch in her jaw—small, but there. She knew. Not the details. But something wasn’t right. She didn’t speak. Neither did I. I was already sitting in her chair, legs kicked up on the edge of the bed. Because I’m not just her brother. I’m a reminder. Even when she’s right, I still win. She didn’t accuse me. She relabeled the USB. She never relabels things.

Meanwhile, Addy was busy doing his own kind of damage control. Submitted soft takedown requests—nothing too heavy handed. Just enough to trigger the algorithms: “unverified source” “potential reputational harm” “property concerns.” It’s a script. BSH ran the same playbook in ‘21 during the Everwell protest leaks. He started grooming the narrative too. Climate influencers with curated faces warning against “misinfo burnout.” Sponsored posts from TerraMax about their “Eco Pipeline Initiative” shot in golden hour lighting with acoustic background music. A full aesthetic lie.
And then Ginny—ever the loyal one—reposted Abby’s seagull reel. Slow motion, sunlight flares, that sad drunk song underneath. The irony almost made me laugh.
She wasn’t supporting Abby. Ginny was burying her.
Redirecting the algorithm. Reframing Abby as just another girl with a good lens and too many feelings. The kind the internet forgets before the next scroll.
Nothing to see here.

Aunt Lydia was the first to speak up about the Abby situation—voice soft like she’d been holding it in too long.
“We should send her back to England. Let her stay with her granny” she said gently.
Addy didn’t even blink. “She’s 24. Lydia.”
Lydia pursed her lips swallowed something heavy. “Your father was like a brother to me” she said. “And your mother… I know what she was, but I owe her too. This hurts me. Watching it all fall apart like this.”
I didn’t have the patience for nostalgia. “Save the sentiment and spit it out, Alfred.”
She inhaled then exhaled like a decision had just been made. “What if we staged a rehab stay? A quiet drug case. Get her out of the way. Off the radar.”
No apology in her tone now. Just strategy.
Addy didn’t even pause. “Abby’s used to the spotlight. Putting her in one only gives her more attention.”
Lydia nodded slow. “Then what about her friends?”
That made me laugh. Bitter and amused. “Arlene and Nate, those kids are walking liabilities. But the other two? They have real connections. That’ll blow up in our faces.”
And let’s not forget—thanks to Addy, Abby got introduced to Percy and Ben. This entire circus wouldn’t exist if she’d stayed a quiet, poetry writing loner in her bedroom with that d@mn violin. But no, Addy had to play PTA mom. Set up playdates with wannabe keyboard warriors. I didn’t have to say it out loud—it was baked into the silence. Everyone in that room knew what dragging a name through the mud could do.
Addy finally looked up, gaze sharp as cut glass. Voice calm. Legal. Final.
“If it escalates, we’ll scare them off. Quietly. Strategically. Until then… no fires, Cain. None.”
And that was it.

Soon the signs of escalation came in the form of a  redacted version of her spreadsheet went public. Redacted, sure—but it still bled. And of course it was Nate. Probably under one of his “satirical” aliases like Les Liaisons Leaked or some clever tr@sh. The article barely scraped 6000 views on some sad little indie site run by journalism school dropouts. But clicks weren’t the problem. Franko traced the traffic. Someone had forwarded it—anonymously—to a sub editor at the Times in Brooklyn. The type who eats whistleblower stories between *** dates. Ginny called it “turbulence.” Said it in that voice like she was announcing bad weather. She told Addy and me “Get your sister back on the ground.”

Addy did what lawyers do best—used five syllables to say, bribe discreetly. Ginny worked her contacts. A couple of "consulting fees" were shuffled through an old media firm in Midtown  and a small donation—tax deductible, naturally—landed at the sub editor’s pet nonprofit: a literacy charity for at risk youth. He got to feel noble. We got silence.

The article vanished within 48 hours. Buried under “server errors” and a polite email citing “uncorroborated sources.” Ginny toasted to it like we’d just won a Cli0.

Two weeks later, I found Abby again. Near my old gym, the one with the warped fire escape. She was alone. Maybe coming back from one of her little huddles—Nate, Arlene, Ben, the whole ragtag bunch trying to play journalist with a Wifi signal and a backup plan made of duct tape. She’d missed a few classes that week. Addy got the call from her Ecology department head. Told them she had mono.  Told them she was sick. Technically not a lie. She was sick. Sick like our “birth giver” was. Sick like my ex. Like most of the women I’ve met who don’t understand the rules of survival. They want chaos, then cry victim when the world doesn’t apologize. She was there. Her Attack On Titan Hoodie half zipped. Puffy eyes and red nose. Fingertips stained in neon green highlighter and the kind of heartbreak you can’t post about because it makes you sound crazy.

Then she smiled. Calm. Like she’d done the crying already. Like she’d filed it somewhere between therapy worksheets and to do lists. Maybe her therapist was actually doing something this time.
“You swapped my drive, Fordy.”
Her voice was low. Almost amused. No accusation. Just fact. I didn’t deny it.
“And you still think you’re helping” she said.
“No” I told her. “I think I’m delaying the inevitable.”
She nodded. “No. I’m delaying the inevitable. You’re just bidding time.”
And she walked past me. Not rushed. Not afraid.
That was her second warning.
Honestly brave but still stup!d.

The next morning  Ginny launched the campaign. Green Horizons. Plastic free oceans. Neon bright turtles gliding through crystal water. Slow motion shots of kids high fiving each other over biodegradable surfboards and oat milk popsicles. Crisp, high res hope. Influencer kitsch wrapped in just enough science to look serious. It hit every demo—from middle class guilt to climate fatigued Genz. It was a masterclass in baiting bored algorithms.

And behind it?

Silence.

For weeks.

For months.

No posts.

No Abby. Not even a story.

.
.
.
.

(continued in the next thread)

Continuation of the Book of Openings (Chap-4) Same TW applicable

Abby hadn’t even messaged me since that night— since she called my bluff and walked off like she’d already decided what came next. I still check her page. Every day. Not because I care. I check because I want to be the first to know when she slips. Because no matter what she sets fire to, I want to be standing there—either with the extinguisher or the gasoline. Because I know Addy. I know Ginny. I know what happens when the machine feels threatened. It doesn’t lash out. It absorbs. It mutates. And when that doesn’t work? It crushes.

But Abby? She isn’t fighting to go viral anymore. She isn’t chasing headlines. She’s logging, recording, filing things away. She’s waiting. Watching. Not posting for traction—but for proof. And that’s a problem. Because she’s not playing to win. She’s planning to torch the board. I’ve seen her like this before—cold, focused, unblinking—back when she used to play chess with Addy as a kid. She’d take loss after loss. Not a flinch. Not a pout. Sometimes red rimmed eyes but she cried only when she was alone. Sometimes a punch in the wall when she’s alone. Never in public. And then one day she’d checkmate Addy with a piece he forgot was on the board.

So I do what I do best. I step back. Light a cigarette. Watch the BSH data servers glow behind the reinforced glass like they’re alive—steady green LEDs blinking like a smug heartbeat. And I whisper, just under my breath—“Your move, little sister.”

And it came. Only, it wasn’t her hand on the piece.
It was Percy.
And Arlene.
Two plays. Coordinated. Timed like they’d rehearsed it. It wasn’t some tantrum post or spreadsheet drop. It was precise. That was her first real move after the warning shots.

Percy kept it lowtech. Analog. Paranoid even. He leaned on his dad’s old contacts from the army—men who’d done tours, worn too many medals and now swapped stories in dim bars with wheelchairs parked by the jukebox. No apps. No emails. Just dead drops—small envelopes left at Legion halls and hospital waiting rooms. Inside, printed QR codes. Each one linked to encrypted drone footage hosted via IPFS—untraceable, unless you knew what to look for. He sent out USB sticks disguised as commemorative dog tags. Mailed through a restricted APO address only accessible to ex military. Each contained exactly two files: a still image pulled from surveillance and a text doc titled readme.txt – Ask Ginny Bass about Caracas. No hashtags. No noise. Just a quiet ember tossed into rooms where silence usually reigned. Whispers began in places we couldn’t spin—retired intelligence circles, veteran forums, a closed Linkd!n thread among old analysts. 

Arlene went the opposite direction. She hand wrote twelve pages. Black ink. Bold caps. Margins scribbled with arrows and taped on receipts—Uber logs, anonymized V3nmo screenshots, a letterhead from TerraMax’s legal office half obscured by a coffee stain. She photocopied the set at the busted campus Xerox in the art building—two hundred copies, minimum. She slid them into radical bookstores that don’t ask for names. Slipped them into climate protest kits, between tote bags and “Free the Soil” stickers. Tucked them under windshield wipers at cafés. And it spread slowly. Someone screen printed one page onto fabric. Then two. The slogan mutated.

It stopped saying Sustainable Bass. Instead it said: Ask Ginny Bass about Caracas.

Spray painted in black on the sides of Amazon delivery totes. Irony turned into identity. It did not trend as a style—people didn’t even know what it meant. But a few wore it. They posted selfies. They hashtagged it - #sustainablebass- an already trending hashtag.

Ginny’s cleanup team didn’t even get close to identifying the original source, but they contained it. Barely. They flagged the defaced Amazon bags as brand misuse, looped in a contact at the logistics side, and got a quiet directive sent out to pull anything tagged at regional hubs.  Meanwhile, her socials team flooded the #sustainablebass tag with glossy climate forward press releases, partner content and fake grassroots reels.

By the weekend, the algorithm couldn’t tell irony from branding. That was the point.

And then came the move none of us saw coming.
Not Abby again. Not exactly. It came from Ben’s campus. Specifically, the verified Inst@gram page of the university’s football team—big following, chaotic energy. Known for locker room T!kT0ks, bad edits and thirst traps of the defensive line in compression shorts. At first glance it looked like one of their usual stunts: a meme. The team captain’s face deepfaked onto an anime maid in a low res video. Ridiculous, harmless.
Except thirty minutes later, they posted a story Black screen. White text. Got hacked lol ignore.
But the video wasn’t just an edit. It was a vehicle. The key was in the audio. Not many people track audio trends—not the way they do hashtags or video content. Especially not BSH. They monitor image recognition, keywords, metadata. Not viral sound bites. That was Abby’s loophole.
The voice over was in Spanish. Distorted. The kind of compression you get from an old radio. Wind in the mic. Something crackling—maybe fire. A man’s voice spoke first:

“Informe final, señora Adler. Área asegurada. Fuego contenido. Sin sobrevivientes.”
(Final report, Ms. Adler. Area secured. Fire contained. No survivors.)

Then a beat.
A woman’s voice crisp. Flat.

“Transfieran el dinero. Ya está hecho.”
(Transfer the money. It’s done.)

That was it. Ten seconds. Then a phonk beat hit—gravel bass, metallic snares. Stylish. Cinematic.  It stayed online for less than an hour before the original team deleted it. But that didn’t stop anything. Because this video had tagged their rival team.

The rival team reposted it—captioned with a meme “This your king?”

That was enough.

Then came the trends, the challenges.

BSH’s internal monitoring picked up the hashtag, but the voice recognition? It didn’t flag “Adler.” The system only tracked the hashtags, keywords and metadata tied to captions and post descriptions. The voice itself was too distorted to be cross referenced by the standard filters.

Two junior analysts flagged the audio, bless their underpaid souls—thought it was AI generated. By the time the official escalation chain even cleared its throat, Ginny Bass had already seen it.

Of course she had. She’s not the kind to wait for red tape to tell her there’s bl0od in the water. Third day in.  I imagine her scrolling through notifications, probably sipping something overpriced and oat milked, when that distorted phonk bass starts blaring from the living room. It must have been Desi, obviously—one of her twin spawns—screaming along to the T!kT0k track while gaming, utterly oblivious to the fact that he’s humming a war crime. And then it hits—Adler.

She checked  the source. 3.2 million views.
Already stitched into everything from anime edits to gym bros deadlifting their self worth. Makeup tutorials. Thirst traps. Sports clips. Not a shred of politics, nature or even eco posturing. None of the feeds we monitor. It had slithered through the cracks—like mold. But here’s the kicker: the voice—her voice, technically, albeit mangled—was the hook. The viral glue. And now it had her name floating beside it like an obituary waiting to be signed. She called us before she even finished swearing. I could practically hear the panic, sharp and sterile. Too late. The thing had already metastasized—mutated and memed and looped into internet corners even we didn’t have claws in.
Ginny knew it.
I knew it.
And the kid playing Fortnite yelled in the background for a snack.

📀🎵 “Informe final, señora Adler... Transfieran el dinero...”

Nobody knew what it meant.
Didn’t matter. It hit like a g0dd@mn sermon.

Ginny—bless her little alias—filed takedown requests like a good girl. Copyright infringement.” “Misleading content.” The usual bureaucratic deodorant for a rotting situation. But the stink had already spread. Downloads, re-uploads, remixes—it was everywhere except anywhere useful. 

BSH, ever the optimists, tried pushing a new clip. Something inoffensive and glossy. Paid influencers, prepped captions, the whole PR charade. But the original voice—that deliciously warped Adler drop—had already carved itself into the digital bloodstream. It wasn’t going anywhere. You can’t scrub bl0od from water.

At first, the masses thought it was meme static. Background nonsense.
Then came the linguists.
Then came the threads.

One etymology nerd linked Adler” to “eagle.”
Some Spanish account cross referenced it with black ops codenames from South America.
A history podcast slowed the clip down like it was jazz and casually compared it to a contractor's training tape.

And then—
Someone who knew too much dropped a little PDF like it was party confetti.

Caracas.
Sixteen de@d.
Minors. Burn site.
Oversight: G. Adler.

Ginny’s maiden name, of course. Subtle as a sledgehammer.

Cue the PR squad. Addy, practically lived on the phone. They tried spinning every narrative—deepfake, mistranslation, data breach, you name it. Sent polite emails to influencers like “Hey, could you delete this murd3r ballad real quick? LOL thanks.”

Meanwhile “official sources” dropped blanket denials so thick you could mistake them for fog.

Addy called me at 3:12am I was already awake—sheets damp, brain buzzing with heat and static. Not nightmares. Just recall. Muscle memory. The taste of scorched air in the back of my throat. “It’s Abby.” he said.
“Caracas?”
“Yes. Someone clipped it. From one of the debrief files. The original post came from a static IP. Not random. Not a fan account.”
“Who?”
“Ben’s dad’s office computer. This wasn’t a hack. It was deliberate.”
I didn’t say anything.
He sighed. “The story said Got hacked lol.’But Ginny isn’t laughing. Neither is legal.”
“How bad?”
“TerraMax bad. But not enough to stand in the court. Investors are… worried. One of  Ginny’s old contacts already offered a sealed affidavit.  As a precaution.This isn’t public yet but it’s moving.”
I listened.
“She thought Adler died with her clearance” he said. “Now she’s a trending audio clip.”
“Looped over thirst traps and mascara tears.”
“No” he said quietly. “Looped over implication. And that’s worse.”

After the call  I played the clip again. Just me. Headphones on. Darkness in the room.

     Final report, Ms. Adler. Area secured. Fire contained.

The phonk bass still echoed—sharp, rhythmic, almost surgical. And it hit me: none of them knew what they’d just unearthed. But we knew. And so did Abby. That was the point. This wasn’t about turtles anymore. Or microplastics. It was personal.

This is escalation. I didn’t wait for Addy’s green signal.

At sunrise, I went straight to Abby’s place—my old apartment.
Used my key. Of course I did. I still owned the lease, the walls, the plumbing… she was just squatting in my leftovers. I was ready to drag her out by her thr0at and end this—whatever this had become—if I had to.

But when I opened the door, there was only the sound of the television.
Her things were still there. Half a mug on the counter. Charger still plugged in. Shoes kicked off like she was planning to come back. But no Abby. And then—on the living room table—I saw it.
My White Rabbit Motel matchbook.
The one I’d left behind last time.  It screamed “If you snoop, I will snoop too.” Abby and her *** symbols. Always needing to say things with metaphors and poetic juxtaposition.

I picked it up. Debated torching the place—impulse, instinct—but it was still under my name. And I hate messing up my things. While I stood there, matchbook in hand, the television droned on about some forgettable sports update, grating on my last nerve. I grabbed the remote and killed the sound with a snap—  A breaking news banner slid across the bottom of the screen. Smooth. Silent. Almost missed. Dr.Regina Darwin it said.

Abby had already made her penultimate move. My phone pinged with the footage of that move.  And this one wasn’t subtle. It didn’t even come from her. She let the woman who gave birth to us make it —this was the X chromosome donor with a god complex. The staircase queen. The She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named  we never mentioned, not even in therapy, except as a footnote in a case study on intergenerational trauma and psychiatric malpractice.

Dr. Regina Darwin. 

She walked into the World Economic Forum summit in Davos like it was a coffee date. First time she’s ever shown up to one of Ginny’s panels. Because spite? It outlasts bloodlines. Ginny was mid speech. Selling blue hydrogen. Talking up regenerative markets and carbon dividends. A practiced smile. No Star wars quotes this time, some people were calling her Darth Vader so only the talking points that had been sanitized, curated, run through PR and softened for global investors.

And then—Regina stood.
Calm. Smiling.
Mic in hand. Voice cold like I remember.

“How do we hold firms like TerraMax accountable when they use aliases like ‘Gin Adler’ to greenwash chemical spills… and cover up w@r crimes?”

The room gasped.Moderators scrambled to discuss whether to kill her mic, whispering into earpieces.
She didn’t mention Abby—of course she didn’t. This wasn’t about the daughter who pushed her down the stairs. This was not about the son who destroyed her late husband’s beloved Greenhouse. This was about Adam. Her golden boy. The one who cleaned up after her breakdowns, balanced the checkbook when she was off having a midlife crisis in some b0mbed out clinic and practically raised his siblings with one hand while holding a textbook on the other one. And then Ginny Bass slithered in—smiling—and stole him. Not with charm. Not with love. But with legal contracts. She gave Adam a life that didn’t orbit Regina. And to Regina, it was betrayal. Pure and simple.  Just like her husband, who cheated while she was pregnant with Abby, and died a couple of  years later in a car crash and then had the audacity to become a posthumous fvcking saint. Adam also had left her behind.

Some textbook mess—woman gets cheated on, replaced, then watches her son reenact the whole damn drama with a better dressed therapist. Projecting the husband wound onto the son.

It’s practically Freudian. Or is it Jungian? Certainly Darwinian. Anyway, the damage was done.

Someone had already filmed it. Of course they had.


And the chess board? Officially On fire.


BSH responded like they always do—fast, polished and with no real soul. A full blown crisis comms protocol triggered within the hour. Ginny hadn’t even gotten off stage yet and the war room was already lit up in five time zones. Slack channels pinging like a g0dd@mn fire drill. Legal, comms, digital ops. Everyone pretending they weren’t watching the clip on loop while clutching oat lattes and praying their names didn’t end up in the damage report.

The first internal memo called it a reputational anomaly.
Which is BSH speak for: someone set fire to our golden calf and we’re going to pretend it’s just a weird sunrise.

Phase One: Control the narrative.
They flooded social media with polished videos of Ginny in lab coats, hugging trees and schoolchildren. A “Day in the Life of a Climate Visionary” gained momentum —her walking a rooftop farm, sipping kombucha, nodding thoughtfully at charts. The usual.

Phase Two: Discredit the accuser.
Problem? The accuser was Dr. Regina Darwin.  She was Caesar's wife. You just hope she doesn’t open another tab. You can’t just discredit her. Not when she’s out there brokering vaccine deals between governments. Not when she’s been nominated for peace prizes and hand fed children during famines on camera. Even if she once tried to dr0wn her daughter in a bathtub. Even if she used her s0n as an ashtray. She was in this game before we were even born.

So they pivoted. Reframe the attack.
Statements were drafted implying she was “emotionally compromised” “estranged from family” and—my personal favorite—“unfamiliar with recent industry regulations.”
A polite corporate way of saying: she’s an old bat having a public meltdown.

Meanwhile, Addy was buried in NDA rewrites and legal briefings, retooling press kits to emphasize Ginny’s “adoptive humanitarian model.” Interns were scrubbing every mention of “Adler and Darwin” from videos to r3ddit posts. One intern passed out after discovering Regina’s name still buried in a 2009 footnote on a TerraMax acquisition audit. HR sent them a fruit basket and a soft NDA.

By midday, news panels were debating “elder academic credibility in the era of AI generated whistleblowing.” None of them could even agree on whether Regina’s mic drop counted as whistleblowing or just “dignified trolling.”
The goal wasn’t clarity. It was chaos. Blur the frame. Muddy the waters. Create enough white noise that no one knew what was real anymore.

Still, the BSH board was panicking. They didn’t dare force Ginny Bass to step down—she was the BSH— too enmeshed, too irreplaceable, too… public. But they didn’t want her front and center either. So they did what boards do best: vague containment. Whispered memos, coded directives. She was “encouraged to take time for strategic recalibration.” Translation: stay off panels, avoid cameras, cancel the Davos thing, but don’t go dark enough to look guilty. Maybe plant some actual fvcking trees in her backyard. Maybe do some t!kt0k with the kids. Be the mom. Be the Mother Mary.
They launched an internal audit—more for show than scrutiny—and greenlit third party consultants to evaluate “media exposure risk.” While somewhere in Geneva, Dr. Regina Darwin was probably eating oysters and reading Rimbaud, knowing damn well she just tilted the entire ecosystem sideways.

Adam’s sweating because TerraMax is not just a firm that BSH handles PR for. TerraMax is him—and BSH is his brainchild. Though not in papers. And Ginny’s going to the dark side. And I’m on the sidelines like the guy who trained all week just to sit out the final match. And Abby? Abby’s throwing out her expired teenage temper tantrum… but with clarity.
Not the kind you get from healing. Or journaling. Or whatever they prescribe these days. Hers comes from rage. White hot. The kind that memorizes. That catalogues. Abby’s rage doesn’t scream. It files paperwork. It archives. It waits.  She’s the girl who push3d Regina down the stairs at thirteen. Then sobbed—not from guilt, but because it violated some internal moral code she couldn’t articulate yet.

Abigail Ann Rutherford. The girl who documented like a librarian. Burned like a poet. And struck like a tactician. And me? Part of me wants her to keep burning. Not because I think she’s right. But because I love fire, especially the ones that eventually burn out. That fire can be useful. Contained. Redirected. Even weaponized. Or just snuffed out.

Because Cain didn’t kill Abel out of hate. He did it because God chose the wrong sibling.

And eldest sibling Adam didn’t even call me. Not even a d@mn voice note. He was “in meetings” which meant he was probably twenty tabs deep in some burner Z00m, wearing yesterday’s shirt and pretending to listen while drafting cease-and-desist letters with his toes.
I got nothing.
Just the group chat going clinically insane. Code names flying. Protocols unspooling like a C0ld War simulation. “Orchid Protocol activated.” “Go full Halcyon on Sequence C.” They were naming operations like Tom Ford perfumes.

And where was I? Still at Abby’s apartment. She never came back.

There was only so much corporate speak I could absorb before my brain started leaking out of my ear. So I did what any emotionally bankrupt person does in the age of collapse—I opened my burner Inst@gram account.

Scrolled through Abby’s page. Nothing.
Her friends. Nothing.
Silence. The algorithm didn’t even know what to feed me anymore.

And then—Percy.

Percy fvcking dropped a Story.
I tapped it. Reflex.

It was him.
Two photos—one without the jacket, one with.

My eyes immediately locked on the audio: Euphoria (Instrumental) – Kendrick Lamar.
No words. Just bass beats, laced with church bells.
And a poll: “Jacket on or off?”
I stared at that jacket—the old, shabby leather jacket.
Mine.
My jacket.
“M0therfvcker.”

The petty little sh!t. I've always hated Percy: Hated his stupid smug voice. Hated his affected gait like he was always about to start voguing in a train station. And now this thrift store bottom feeder was parading around in my jacket like he invented winter…

And for the record? That jacket always suited me better so I voted “off.” A confetti blew up on my screen. The story showed only 3% had voted “off”. These kids don't even know what’s good for them. I placed the phone back on the table and stepped out onto the balcony for a breather.

The night was young. I lit a cigarette with the same matchbook Abby had left for me, watching the smoke rise through the darkness like a flare meant for only one person to read.

Because I know what’s next. Abby’s checkmate move is coming.

And God’s algorithm doesn’t care who’s innocent. Only what trends.

Warning - contains themes of death of children, murder and cover up, trauma, Self-harm
Please read with caution if these topics are distressing to you. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

Chapter 5- The Earth Will Testify (Adam’s POV)

I crouched in Abby’s nursery, the smell of blood clinging to my clothes. Mother had shattered another wine glass, her screams echoing down the hall. Fordy, barely ten , scrubbed blood off the tiles while I rocked Abby in her crib. Her tiny fists gripped my thumb like an anchor. “It’s okay, Addy…” Fordy muttered, sweat dripping into the bleach bucket. “I’ll clean it all up.”

Back then I never knew that “cleaning up” would become our curse.

Now I’m on my twelfth call today and my voice feels like gravel. The overhead lights buzz like they’re about to confess something. Another fixer—one of Ginny’s—patches in. His voice is pure static, like he chews glass for breakfast. He timestamps everything he says, like truth’s a filing cabinet. “09:41. How do we contain this?”
I stare at the ceiling. There’s a crack running through the plaster like a hairline fracture in a skull.
“We don’t” I say. “We dilute.”

You don’t dam a river. You flood the plains.

We buried the leak under layers of manufactured complexity—too many timelines to track, mother’s name smeared just enough to raise an eyebrow, not enough to break hearts. Semantic noise pumped into every feed. Contradictions nested in contradictions.

Until the story got… boring.

And that’s the real win, isn’t it? Not silence. Indifference.

We never meant to build a company that lied.
Just one that could survive long enough to make the truth irrelevant.
Bass Strategic Holdings was that idea—precision in a tailored suit. Not a monster. Just a necessary machine.
And TerraMax?
TerraMax  was supposed to dig holes. Extract, invoice, disappear into quarterly reports and ESG slide decks. Nothing else.

I was thirty and not naive enough to believe in clean wins. Legal head at a boutque litigation firm in DC. Fordy had just cycled out of the military. Six months into civilian life and already restless. He dragged me to some grimy bar—said the wings were good. They weren’t. That’s where I met Ginny Adler or rather Ginny Bass. Former military intelligence. Discharged but still lethal in the way she processed a room. Her husband, Jamie Bass, had a background in strategic operations and a fixation on scalable influence. He called it “applied leverage.” That night they pitched something strange: a consultancy that advised celebrities and firms  on what to say when things went wrong.

Jamie had the theory. Ginny had the contacts. Fordy had field skills. And I?

I had the compliance playbook.

We registered it in Delaware: Bass Strategic Holdings. Officially, a boutique PR consultancy. Unofficially, we offered legal strategy layered with reputation triage. Narrative control for volatile markets. I drafted the founding documents. Backdated the advisory clauses. Built the firewall. The Rutherford Foundation—my father’s—contributed the seed capital. Quietly. Disguised as a philanthropic consulting retainer.

Now, I hear his voice when I close my eyes too long as if the soil on his grave had started to speak back.
I twist the cap off a bottle of water and take a gulp, but my hands shake, sending a trickle down the side of my mouth and onto my shirt.  Reflexively, I wipe it away with the back of my hand.
Across the room, the blinds stutter against the windowpane, jittering in rhythm with the AC unit.
My screen glows—emails, flags, encrypted memos. A red notification pulses: TerraMax Internal Risk Map—CONFIDENTIAL.
I click.
The PDF opens like a wound.

My father, Dr. Gabriel Rutherford, was a professor of ecology. A man who believed in soil cycles, carbon offset and native tree restoration. He used to spend weekends in our backyard planting trees by hand muttering things like "Nature doesn’t lie. But people do."
It was a warning, though I hadn’t realized it at the time.

He left when my mother was 8 months pregnant with Abby. Left for someone younger. Not divorced. Just... gone. We didn’t see him for months.
Then one day, he was gone for good—car crash.
Regina, still legally married, became a widow. As a public figure that was a blessing. Better a  widower than a divorce. Dr Regina Darwin was already a  global pediatric health hero, vaccine trailblazer in sub Saharan Africa. But that was only on paper.

At home, she crumbled. Violent. Volatile. I was sixteen. I became the man of the family. I hate my father for that. For abandoning us. For leaving us with the cleanup. For dying before I could make him explain.

Although he left wreckage—I built a legacy. I’ve done more for the Rutherford name than he ever did. I funneled foundation money into Abby’s college, put his name on a new eco-sciences building—Dr Gabriel Rutherford Hall. Gave his ghost a makeover and nailed it to a bronze plaque. And if he knew that the foundation he built—his precious name—helped seed fund TerraMax? He’d claw his way out of that grave.

The man sowed the seeds. I harvested lithium.

A soft knock.

Lydia lets herself in before I answer, as always, moving like she’s lived here longer than I have. She sets a file down, neat as ever, her eyes skimming me like a scanner, already diagnosing the storm behind my silence .

She’s not just my assistant. She’s Lydia Alward—godmother, or Alfred, as Fordy likes to call her. The woman who kept the lights on and the wolves out when my mother was too deep in her episodes to function. Lydia handled the adult things so I didn’t have to—mortgage notices, medication refills, the quiet logistics of survival. And when CPS came knocking, she didn’t flinch. Just looked me in the eye and said “Addy, stay here with Abby and Fordy. I’ll take care of it. Okay?”
I nodded through tears because I believed her. She was twenty four then. Young enough to walk away. But she didn’t.
She stayed. Long after the charity of it had run out.

Lydia reads off her tablet, voice clipped. “An NGO just issued a statement so vague it practically came in Morse code. ‘Emerging reports… civilian casualties… scrutiny required.’”
She looks over her glasses at me. “No names. No teeth. Just a nudge. A storm cloud without lightning.”
“Intentional” I say, eyes on the screen. I’m already outlining fallback narratives in a document labeled contingency-neutral-b. The cursor pulses like it’s waiting to say I told you so.
“You're bleeding, Addy.” she says, not unkindly. “And you keep saying it’s rain.”
I roll my neck, listen to the joints crack. “The bleeding’s fine. There is enough blood. It’s the arteries I worry about.”
Lydia exhales through her nose. “TerraMax should never have been born.”
“No.” I say, voice flat. “TerraMax’s birth isnt the problem. She just had a rough adolescence. Did some damage. We’ll undamage it.”

TerraMax was born in 2017.  Not really a teenager right now.  It started out as a mid tier extraction firm flagged a lithium vein just past the Sonoran belt—cheap land, minimal oversight. I named it TerraMax. It looked like infrastructure. It ran like a mining op. It didn’t need a face.“Mining….” my father used to say “always digs up more than dirt.”
So I kept mine off paper.

Instead, I hired Aaron Daniels.
On paper: CEO. Clean as a whistle. Installed through an executive search firm that never knew who was paying them. Ex logistics. Crisis-trained. Soft voice, sharp forecasts. Publicly ethical. Privately obedient. He doesn’t know me. He knows Andrew—my ghost alias. The name that speaks through encrypted Signal threads, dead drops routed through fake NGOs and Slack channels hosted by OrionOps—our front in Singapore. He’s smart enough not to ask who Andrew is. Smarter still not to care.

Me? I’ve always stayed one clause away. One layer removed. It’s how I sleep at night. Or used to….. If Aaron’s the face, I’m the hands and no one sees a hand when the glove fits.
TerraMax doesn’t know me. “ But I built it in my image—untouchable, deniable, necessary.”

I don’t realize I’ve said that last part aloud until Lydia speaks.
She’s watching me, jaw tight. “You really believe that?” Her voice cuts through the memory fog like a scalpel.
“I believe in cleanup. I believe in future versions. I believe in control.”
“You always did.” she murmurs. “Even when you were sixteen and pretending you weren’t raising two kids.”
I gave her a look. “We’re not doing memory lane today.” Even though I was doing memory lane these past few months.
“Fine.” she snaps. “Then let’s talk about the present. Abby went rogue. The Caracas audio is out. And your ‘narrative firewall’ isn’t built for holy crusades with camera phones and memes.”
“I was sterilizing TerraMax for months before Abby threw herself on the altar.” I say. “Preemptive cleanup. We had whispers—indie journos with cracked screens and more faith than funding. So I ghosted the trail.”
“Define ghosted” she says, folding her arms.
“No direct payroll links. Logistics blurred through dormant shells. Most trails vanish in Luxembourg PO box older than the European union.”
“Jesus, Adam.”
“Luxembourg’s very discreet.”
“You built an invisible empire.”
“No. I built a firewall of implication. There’s a difference.”
“And Abby blew a hole in it.” she says.
I nod once. “She made it impossible to clean up.”
“No Addy, you made it impossible.”

She stands and for a second she’s not my assistant—she’s the woman who used to tape my mother’s pills into a weekly organizer and tell Fordy bedtime stories when he was too angry to sleep. She picks up her coat.
She stops in the doorway. “Do the right thing.”
“That’s a very Catholic thing to say.” I say lightly.
“Someone has to be.” she says.
And leaves.

The phone rings. I answer without checking the caller ID. My voice comes out clean.
“Adam Rutherford.”
Another BSH investor. Asking about Caracas again.

2019. Caracas.
The brief read: “probable narco-militia activity near asset zones.”


Abby’s pdfs will make you think we sent in a private army. And like Dr. Regina Darwin so righteously asked at Davos—was it a war crime? No. It wasn’t a war. And it wasn’t an army.
The PMC listed in the files—CYPRES Risk Management—was a front. Jamie and I set it up two years earlier through OrionOps. On paper: Dubai based, Latin American clearance, multilingual teams, ex military leads.
In reality? Five people.
Two were real—Jamie’s Army buddies. One flew drones. One ran overwatch and consulted for oil execs. The other three? Ginny. Jamie. Fordy. That was the whole team. When we landed, what we found in Caracas wasn’t a militia.  It wasn’t cartel soldiers. It was the locals. Parents. Protestors.

The mine had caved in a week earlier. Not one of ours—technically.  It was run by Loma Verde Holdings—a shell company Id created through OrionOps. Sixteen dead. Five of them were minors. We didn’t order it. We didn’t know. But we used the usual methods.

During the “risk assessment” we noticed Alvarez—the financier—started acting strange.
He wasn’t just laundering bribes for police and regulators. He was the bridge: between our shell, the local government and the NGOs watching “worker safety” from their five star hotels. And when the shaft collapsed, he didn’t try to fix it.  He was trying to become a whistleblower. Not out of guilt—self preservation. We couldn’t let that happen. One leak, one interview, one USB in a quiet café—and TerraMax wouldnt be facing rebranding.
We’d be facing tribunals. Frozen assets. Conspiracy charges in three countries. And that made him too dangerous to leave breathing.

Fordy went in with Jamie and the two real contractors. What happened in that apartment wasn’t a firefight. It was containment. The kill was Fordy’s. Sanctioned. Clean.
Until the financier’s younger brother walked in. Maybe ten. Maybe less.

Fordy froze–

“Want me to heat that up?”
I blink. Look up.

Tom—Lydia’s assistant—is by the end of the table, sleeves rolled, holding a cup of mint tea like it might actually fix something. He’s young, sharp, too perceptive for someone paid to manage calendars.
He nods at the untouched plate.
“You’ve been staring it into extinction.”
I glance down. The salmon’s lost its sheen. Asparagus limp. Lemon wedge dried up at the edges.
“It’s fine,” I say.
Tom sets the tea down on a coaster with quiet precision and backs away. I hear the soft click of the door closing behind him.

The room’s too still. The kind of stillness that pulls you under.

Not for long. A second, maybe. The boy bolted. And I gave the order.
Contain the scene.

Fordy lit the place.

We framed it as an unauthorized civilian engagement during an asset denial maneuver.
The coroner’s report vanished under a tangle of jurisdictions. Unidentified male. Age 8–12. Ginny paid the locals in cash and  buried the incident under a nondisclosure cascade.

Jamie never spoke about it again. He died six months later. Heart attack.
His twins were seven. They said it was stress. I think it was guilt.

Fordy never recovered. That freeze—the second he hesitated—got into his bloodstream.
Still there.

And me? I rewrote our crisis comms the day we got back. We called it ‘civil unrest linked to criminal elements.’ Caracas would never happen again. Not officially. 

Then the families were offered compensation—The ones who didn’t take the deal got threats. Not from us—never directly. Just reminders that land records can disappear. That water access can be revoked. That if their names made it to the media, someone might ask why their children were working off books in an illegal shaft. The coroner got paid twice—once to classify the miners as “unregistered trespassers” and once to forget he had. The mayor’s office got a development grant through a partner foundation.  A bishop ran “healing seminars.” The police chief got promoted to Caracas.

We knew how to kill the story. Not with bullets. With indifference. With bureaucracy. With the kind of silence you can’t scream through. And it worked. Within three weeks, Caracas was just another unstable red zone. Another data point in a quarterly report.

A message ping snaps the smoke trail of memory.
I glance at the ID—Fordy.
He texts: “Abby’s a wildfire now.”

I stare at the screen like it might offer context. Then typed back: “She’s not the enemy, Fordy.”
Ten seconds. No typing dots. No reply.
The pulse in my neck starts to throb. My finger hovers over the call button.

I hit it.

The phone rings once. Twice. Three times.
Then, Fordy answers, his voice tight, strained.

“You called her a ‘non-threat’ six months ago.” His words hit hard, each syllable a punch wrapped in restraint.

“And I was right then” I say, the weight of it pulling me under. “Now she’s a variable. Not a villain.”

“Same d@mn thing, Addy” he snaps, his voice coiled tight like a spring ready to snap
.
“No. It’s not.” I bite back. Not in anger. “That’s not how we treat family.”

The silence stretches out. His breathing becomes ragged, like he’s pacing, running out of room to hold it in. Then Fordy laughs—bitter, like the taste of copper. Not cruel. Just… empty.

“She used to say the dumbest ***. You remember? ‘Brush your teeth or the spider queen will judge you.’”
I closed my eyes, “She wore your boots for that one.”

“D@mn near tripped and still went all in.” he says. His voice softens, just a fraction. “I loved that. Her commitment. I really did.”

“She still does have that commitment. That’s the problem.”

There’s a long pause. He exhales sharply—frustrated, like a man who's been waiting for this moment to come crashing down.

“I don’t want to hurt her, Addy. You know that, right?” His voice cracks like glass under pressure.

“I know.” I whisper, but not convinced.

“But I’ll burn that Percy Jackson wannabe to the ground if I have to.” Fordy continues, the promise cold and dangerous. “He took my jacket.”

“Fordy—”

“The quiet one. Soft grey. Double-stitched.” His voice turns dark, focused. “You know the one. My old one. Heavy as *** but never wrinkled. I swear, I—”

“The one you wear on flights, even when its eighty degrees out?”  I Interrupted.

“Yeah. That one.”

I exhale slowly, holding it in until my chest aches. “I’ll get it back. I’ll ask Teresa  or…just… don’t light anyone on fire this week.”

The pause is thick, then, grudgingly, “Deal.”

He exhales sharply, like a fist unclenching after a punch thrown too hard.

“She still won’t answer my calls. Do you think she hates us?” Fordy asks, his voice breaking, like he’s asking it of himself as much as me.

“She still loves you, Fordy. It’s me she hates.” I answer with conviction.

“I know.” he says, a bitter laugh curling at the end of his words.
I hang up the phone, the click sharp in the quiet. I took a long exhale. Outside, I hear the low hum of traffic, the world moving on without us.

A minute later, another message pinged.
From Fordy.  A meme.
Some cursed mashup of cats harmonizing over the Carcass audio, meowing in fake sirens, timed with soundbites from the security footage leak.

Typical Fordy—humour as a blowtorch. Meanwhile, he’s still holed up in Abby’s apartment like it’s his personal war room. While she’s at Percy’s. Teresa  Davis—Percy’s  mother—called me when Abby showed up at her door. I told her Abby and I had a fight. She didn’t ask questions. Just said “Alright.” like she got it.

Teresa’s solid. Abby’s safe—not because of Percy, but because no one breaches the Davis house. Not Fordy. Not even Ginny.

They’re not like me. They don’t work on principle. They work on pattern recognition. And Abby just triggered every alarm.

To them, she’s not family. She’s a breach.

(Continuation of - The Earth will testify - Same trigger warnings apply)

And breaches?
They get sealed.

Just like Caracas.

Back then, TerraMax moved fast.
Within hours, legal scrubbed the trail. Loma Verde dissolved through an old shell firm. We funneled contracts into Martha Alta Resources—same mine, cleaner paper. Safety officers staged oversight. Auditors flew in with GoPros.

Same lithium.  A different name. A different face.

Thus we buried a system collapse—a failure engineered to look like due process. A loophole masquerading as legality.  The protests faded. The headlines stopped. The masses forgot.

And now that system is unraveling.

Not with lawsuits.

But with—

“ soundbites”
Ginny’s voice cut clean through the line—flat, controlled and metallic. The kind of calm you hear before a building collapses. She’d called right after the board meeting. I hadnt picked up the first two times. Third time, I answered.

“They want me off Davos because of some soundbites and that old bat’s yapping” she said without preamble. “‘Time to recalibrate–’”
Pause.
Long enough to hear the static under her breath.

“Like I’m a *** algorithm” she muttered. “Like I didn’t build this empire out of spreadsheets and bone marrow and a dead husband.”
I didn’t answer. She wasn’t talking to me. Not really. When she gets like this—cold and distant—she’s talking to some invisible tribunal. Testifying for a history that hasn’t been written yet.

“Let them try.” she said finally. “I’m not stepping down. They don’t want my head. They want my silence. And they will get it.”
Click. Line went dead.

I stared at the screen. Not shocked. Just calibrated. Because this was never about the truth.
It’s about pressure.

Abby and her friends don’t have credible evidence. Because I never leave trails. So they dont  want courtrooms. They want cortisol. 3 am inboxes. Legal teams sweating through ergonomic chairs. The kind of siege that doesn’t need bombs—just bandwidth and panic. That’s the new activism: weaponized anxiety.

So I decided to apply counterpressure.

Arlene.
I logged in through an old academic liaison account. Flagged Arlene’s old essay under anonymous faculty concern—just enough to trigger a delay in her panel approval. Scholarship funded and barely tenure-tracked. A plagiarism flag wouldn’t sink her, but it would stall her next panel invite—and that’s enough.

Nate.
Allergic to compromise. Addicted to purpose. But he still needs to eat.
I pinged Lydia on Signal.
“Create a freelancer package for Nate Turner. Use the BluePrint alias. 5k per piece. Emphasize journalistic independence.”
She replied within seconds–
“Already queued. NDAs en route. Want the soft or hard sell?”
“Soft. Make it feel earned.”
Offer baited. Trap set. Let him wonder if it’s luck or recognition. Let him squint at the fine print.

Percy.
Raised by war rooms and embassies.
I forwarded a vague concern to our contact at WhisperGraph: “Possible modeling account inconsistency—tagged in photos with conflicting timestamps. Might be a fake account impersonating him. Flag and review?”
The report would be automated. Ambiguous. Impersonal.
He’ll feel the heat, even if it doesn’t burn.

Ben.
The most dangerous kind—brilliant,  idealist, and immune to cash.
I didn’t bother with bribes. I emailed Elson on the BSH cybersecurity response team. Subject line: “Run Protocol Pale Mirror. Flag for internal anomaly trace.”

Two minutes later he replied:
“Running it now,” Elson replied. “Any preference on the signature?”

I paused.

“Subtle.” I typed. “Make it look like a metadata sync issue—half corrupted, just real enough to chase.”

A moment later, a sticker popped up—some cursed skeleton in a tutu with angel wings and a glitter wand. On it, bossman.
I stared at it.
Exactly the kind of digital gremlin Abby would’ve sent. For a second, I almost screenshotted it. Then I didn't. 

Abby. Ben. Elson. Yes.

Elson understood the game. He’d spin a traceable “breach” into Ben’s inbox within the hour—enough corrupted metadata to send him down a rabbit hole.
Nothing devours a coder’s time like phantom code that looks just real enough.

But Abby?

I didn’t touch Abby.

Because the moment I do, she’ll know I’m playing defense. And Abby’s always been most dangerous when she thinks she’s winning. Last time she beat me, it was a chessboard. I overlooked a pawn. She never let me forget it.

So I wait.

Three timelines ticking toward collision: The public story. The private cleanup.
And whatever script is playing in Abby’s head.

Although now that script has a soundtrack. Viral. Looped. Auto tuned. Ginny’s voice, warped into a techno mantra: “Transfieran el dinero.” The internet thinks it’s satire.  But I know the origin. It was drone footage—captured during overwatch. Audio synced from field comms, encoded for internal review.  It should’ve been deleted after 72 hours. Protocol. But someone broke it. Saved it. 

Abby thinks she’s exposing greed. She thinks it’s a fight between TerraMax and cartel affiliates—something about a scorched zone, a classified engagement, a literal fire. But “Fire” wasn’t a battle. It was a codename. For the mine collapse. There was never a war crime. Not even under international statute. Even if a non state PMC had killed cartel linked minors and covered it up—legally, technically, it is not a war crime. She got it wrong. Thank God she got it wrong.

I shut my eyes.

Not to sleep—sleep’s a luxury I quit years ago—but just to make the static stop. My inbox is blinking like a heart monitor. NGO murmurs. Legal traps. Abby’s voice looping in the back of my skull like a bad frequency.

The cursor blinks. I don't.

Then everything tilts.

Suddenly I’m back on that old living room floor— sun bleeding through busted blinds. Abby’s small hands sticky with apple juice, cross-legged beside me while I revised for a class I would ace.

“Addy?”

“Yeah.”

She had that soft voice she used when she was about to ask something insane. Or profound. Usually both.

“What happens if the moon just gets bored? like…. decides to leave?”

I lower the paper. “The moon?”

“Yeah. Just floats off.”

“Well, the moon keeps our tides in check. It keeps Earth steady, like a hand on your shoulder. So if it floats off then oceans go wild. Weather turns unpredictable. Whole ecosystems start falling apart. Earth would wobble—angry, unbalanced.”

She considers. “So… don’t *** off the moon.”

I give her a look. “Sound advice.”

A pause.

“Do spiders sleep?”

“Sort of. They get still and rest, like when you close your eyes but don’t dream. Sometimes their legs twitch a little, like tiny hiccups”

Another pause.

“Knock-knock.”

I sigh. “Seriously?”

She grins. “Knock-knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Lettuce.”

“Lettuce who?”

“Lettuce in—it’s cold!” She laughs so hard she snorts. “Fordy said that one’s a classic.”

I shake my head. She leans her head against my knee, soft and still.

“I like asking you things” she whispers. “Even the dumb ones. You always answer.”

“They’re not dumb.” I say. “They’re yours.”

The room fades.

Shifts.

Time slips back into my bones.

When I open my eyes again, the office light is still on—too sharp, too sterile.
Everything hums.
My neck aches. My jaw’s clenched. I’ve drooled a little on the inside of my fist. Professionalism at its peak.
Across the desk—just left of my laptop, buried under five flagged memos and an untouched protein bar—is a photo frame.

I almost forgot it was still there.

BSH Christmas party. The one where we wore formals. Fordy’s in a tie, crooked. Abby’s holding a cupcake and mid-laugh. Lydia’s got her arm around all three of us like she built the d@mn company herself. And me? I’m smiling. Actually smiling. Not the closed-mouth PR smile. A real one. Abby made me post it on ***.
“Come on, Addy. Just one real post. Not a quote. Not a stock image. Just us.”
It’s the only photo on my grid with a caption. The only one with real people in it.
“Family. Complicated. Surviving anyway.
I stare at it too long.
That’s the problem with fatigue. It lets things through the cracks.

If she ever gets it right—if she connects the audio – It won’t be a headline. It’ll be a reckoning….

So I pick up my phone.
And I call her….
I called Abby.

Fourth ring. She picked up. I could hear the breath hitch, the damp echo of tears she’d already wiped away. And then her voice—quiet, almost warm.
“Hello…” Almost like we were siblings again then–
“.... Big Brother “

Not Addy.

Not Adam.

But Orwell’s Big Brother

“Abby” I said. “I just want to talk.”
“You had the time to talk Adam” she said “you chose gaslighting me instead.”
“I did not call to fight. I can help.”
“That’s the problem. ” she replied, a scalpel wrapped in silk. “You think help means control. Cutting off loose ends.”
“I’m trying to keep you safe.”
“From what?” Her tone edged toward soft fury. “The truth?”

Silence stretched between us. Then she dropped it—almost gently.

“I miss when all three of us were in our apartment. Watching Battleship. You explained how buoys worked for ten minutes like it was life or death—like I hadn’t passed physics….
But I let you…. Because you used to love teaching me things.”

Her voice caught, but didn’t break.

“You taught me to ask questions, Adam. Not Fordy. Not Mother. Not dad. You did.”

I didn’t speak. Because it wasn’t a memory. It was a warning. Then she said it—gently, like a gift I didn’t deserve–
“I’m giving you a heads-up. Because once, you gave me one.”

A pause.

“You’re fine. Technically. Just don’t be stupid.”

My words. Thrown back at me like shrapnel.

“Abby—”
“Don’t ‘Abby’ me. Just… listen. Or don’t. Eventually someone will.”

Click.

Silence filled the room. Thick. Cold

Here’s the thing people forget: Pressure only works if the foundation’s weak.
Mine? Reinforced since Caracas. Quietly. Brick by legal brick. Contracts, NDAs, restructured shells and firewalled narratives— enough plausible deniability to make the Vatican jealous.

And yet Abby keeps cutting. She doesn’t even know what I’ve been trying to fix. She just knows it bleeds—and that’s enough.

I called Lydia.
She answered mid-sigh—sharp enough to shave bone.

“Addy. Sit down.”

“I’m seated.”

“No. Spiritually. This is the part where you admit I was right.”

I shut my eyes. “About what?”

“TerraMax. It got away from you.”

“I was fixing it.”

“Quietly. Legally. Halfway.”

“Then Abby lit the fuse.”

She didn’t argue. She never does when she’s right. “So what now?” she asked.

“We bleed the momentum. No fire. No smear campaigns.”

Lydia exhaled, slow and dry—like a page turning mid inquest.“We outlast it?”

“We redirect it.”

The call ended, its final words lingering in the silence. I didn’t know when I fell asleep—only that I woke to the sound of a Pelican case slamming onto my desk.
Lydia.
Still wearing yesterday’s eyeliner and judgment.

“I spoke to Eliza Blackwood.” she said. “Human rights consultant. She’ll audit TerraMax. Publicly. If you let her.”

“That’s a suicide mission.”

“No. It’s chess. Transparency buys time.”

“We’ll have to redact everything.”

“Start with the truth” she said. “Bury the rot in light.”

I nodded because this isn’t about vindication. I’m not trying to win this war. I’m just trying to keep Abby and Fordy alive. Abby doesn’t know what she’s walking into. Fordy’s spiraling. The board’s hunting. And Ginny? Ginny’s gone cold. And when Ginny goes cold, people don’t just disappear. They dissolve—without trace, without obituary.

So I pivoted. Quiet containment. Public sacrifice. Strategic light.

Aaron Daniels was already playing his part.

After the Lydia’s brief, I sent a single line to his secure comm:

Diversify attention vectors. Highlight sustainability wins. Prepare for optics.

Daniels moved fast. He called an emergency session—Legal, PR, ESG—his board lit up the screen with sentiment heatmaps and stakeholder volatility models. Damage control by spreadsheet.

Back in my office, I drafted a formal proposal to BSH’s ethics committee:
Voluntary governance changes. Community veto power. Academic oversight. Third party audits.
A leash. A window. Plausible innocence, gift wrapped.

And inside the Pelican case on my desk : every TerraMax sin that was sanitized just enough to look reformable.
I signed off on the audit. Knew it was theater. Knew it didn’t matter.

Survival doesn’t demand belief. Just performance.

And buried beneath it all? One thin wire:  Verdant Keel LLC—the ghost shell we used to funnel seed capital to TerraMax. A fake real estate invoice, signed once—A. Rutherford, strategic facilitator. The only real breadcrumb. Still buried on a Zurich server. Known only to me and Lydia. I closed the file. Engaged biometric lock.

Then I texted Lydia:

Implement the soft purge. No smears. Just light.

Her reply came fast:

“Already done. And Addy?”

“Yeah?”

“She’s your sister. Not your liability.”

I stared at that line too long.

Because Lydia’s wrong.

Abby is both. So is Fordy. And I love them both anyway. God help me.

But love doesn’t extinguish fire.
So I prepped the deadman switch. Drafted the clause. Finalized the fail safe. Because if Abby pushes too hard, they won’t just bury the story. They’ll bury her.

And I won’t let that happen.
Not again.

That was my first mistake. Thinking I could bury her outrage.Thinking silence was mercy.

I should not have suppressed Abby’s post on Sonora. I should’ve let Sonora burn. Loud. Honest.  Let the world choke on the smoke.
And while they were coughing, I could’ve buried Caracas in the ash. But I didn’t.

Now the earth will testify. And if I don’t contain it soon enough— the dead will rise to bury us.