135 KILL DORIN PLEASE
Lander Strong's phone buzzed. He froze at the screen.
"Dorin's life depends on your cooperation. Call us or she dies."
The words hit like ice.
Lander's mind spun. "Who would snatch Dorin to force him into cooperating? A subject from one of his recent investigations? A rival contractor?" he thought.
His mind raced.
But nothing fit — nobody should care about him this much to kidnap Dorin.
Then a name snapped into mind: Ethen Lace.
He was the fugitive quantum mind that almost everyone wanted—SIA, the conglomerates, anyone who wants the perfect hacker.
In the basement of the agency, he kept a stack of things he'd sworn he'd never need again: old SIA-surplus rigs, jerry-built signal scramblers, a handful of tracking toys—his secret arsenal from the days he'd been running investigations in the SIA.
He hadn't had cause to use them since opening Strong & West, but tonight they looked like the only chance he had.
Once the machines thrummed to life, he dialed the number.
"Who took Dorin?" he demanded when someone answered in scrambled voice.
"You don't need to know," the voice said, clipped and void of pity. "Deliver Ethen Lace, or Dorin West dies."
The line went dead.
Lander swallowed with despair.
"How do you turn over a person you've never even found?"
He tried to trace the call, but he found nothing. This was beyond him.
He paced the agency like a trapped animal. He couldn't go to the police because they were useless, and the SIA was worse; they were looking for Ethan Lace themselves.
There was only one person he could call.
He pushed another button and waited.
When Damen Dark answered, Lander didn't waste the breath to sugarcoat it. "Damen, I've got a problem. Someone took Dorin hostage. They want Ethen Lace."
There was a long beat on the other end.
Then Damen's voice, measured, razor-calm said, "Stay put. Don't move. I'll pull in professional hackers to trace Dorin. Don't do anything reckless by yourself."
"Isn't there something I can do?" Lander asked.
It was the first time Damen saw hopelessness in him- not even when he was about to be executed by the SIA, was he in this state.
He was genuinely afraid now.
"No, the best you can do now is nothing. Don't sound too eager to cooperate with the kidnappers. Just leave the rescue to us this time", Damen said.
Lander let out a breath that felt like it had been held for days. "Alright. I'll wait for your call."
------
Kail stretched his mental nets through the city, probing security feeds and traffic relays for any hint of Dorin's capture. He found nothing — and that silence was telling.
"There isn't a single camera that caught her," he said, his voice tight. "Footage across town was scrubbed. Deliberately and recently. Whoever did it know exactly what they were erasing."
Damen's jaw hardened. "A professional hacker is involved in this."
Kail's eyes narrowed as the pattern clicked into place. "It could be the same hacker who tampered with my orders in the Zetheris warehouse."
Zairgid's worry showed in his hands. "So where do we start?"
"Start with the Zetheris," Damen said. "If their hacker is active, everything points back to them. We work from there."
Kail ran a targeted comparison across every Zetheris-owned property and nearby cameras. He wasn't searching for Dorin's face — he was searching for edits, for gaps, and for the digital fingerprints of a deliberate deletion.
He was looking for cover-ups.
After grinding through hours of footage, he found two anomalies.
"These two properties," Kail said, tapping the screen and bringing up the timestamps, "show the most deliberate removals during the window of the abduction. One is Zetheris' HQ. The other is an abandoned warehouse out in the suburbs which was long ignored, with no recent activity until now. Either could be the holding site."
"The choice is obvious: the warehouse is the sort of place where a kidnap could be hidden from public scrutiny. There are too many people in Zetheris HQ to keep someone", Zairgid opined.
Damen gave a single, precise order.
"Soldiers move out."
Fortress Myrone's meta soldiers moved like a dark tide, converging on the warehouse, staking it out, their weapons and wards ready, waiting for the slightest flicker of movement within.
-----
[In a warehouse somewhere]
"Lander Strong — tell us where Ethen Lace is, or Dorin West dies." The voice on the line was flat and mechanical with menace.
"How many times do I have to say it? I don't know anything about Ethen Lace. Release her — you're on the wrong lead." Lander's voice was tight and controlled.
"We'll kill her if you don't comply."
"Do what you want… I can't give you something that I don't have", Lander replied on the other side.
Threats rattled the line, but Lander held firm. Frustration crawled across the kidnappers like an infection.
"What do we do now? He's not complying," Dackerie muttered, rubbing his temple.
Exoren paced the concrete floor of the warehouse, the lamps outside painting harsh lines across his face.
Doubt flared in his mind.
Had he misread Lander?
Acyros watched him with unreadable expression.
"Just cut her throat. Send pieces back to Strong. That'll make him talk," she said quietly.
Dackerie's lips curled in disgust. "Is that necessary?" he asked.
A hard look from Acyros sealed his silence. She wasn't joking when she said that.
Something beeped on Dackerie's data pad.
Then Dackerie snapped a holoslate to life and twisted the feed before showing them. "Erm…sir, please look at this."
"What is it?" Exoren asked, leaning in to view the holo screens.
"There is an ambulance at Lander's agency," Dackerie said.
The line stuttered as live footage filled the air.
He hesitated, then added, "Lander is having a heart attack. They're rushing him out."
"What…are you serious? He's just on the phone moments ago arguing with us?" Exoren shouted.
They watched the blur of paramedics loading a stretcher, the flashing lights swallowing the alley.
Time passed weirdly in the warehouse.
Their plan, the kidnap and leverage, all of it was wobbling on a single, impossible event- Lander Strong having a heart attack at that moment.
"This is insane or is it my luck", Exoren smashed his table.
They waited for the hospital call. When it came, the words landed like a blow.
"Lander Strong is in a coma. Doctors don't know when he'll wake."
"Bloody hell," Exoren spat. "How does he have a heart attack now of all times?"
Dackerie's eyes tracked to the silent form of Dorin in the containment room. "So, he can't talk now," he said flatly. "Now what do we do with her?"
"Just kill her. There are too many loose ends to deal with by holding a live person", Acyros suggested to the horror of Dackerie.