Chapter Text
The room was dim in the CIA outpost in Tajikistan. The walls were cold and unfeeling, almost as if echoing the isolation Rebecca Lawson felt in her growing disillusionment.
She was doing a satellite imagery sweep of Afghanistan only a few hours ago, where she noticed a clearing recently flattened, geometric in shape—evidence of human activity in an area where there shouldn’t have been any. Tire tracks. Burn patterns from flare testing. Temporary landing markers. It was subtle, but her gut flagged it. She tagged the coordinates.
Later that day, she scanned radio frequencies, happening upon an encrypted burst coming through from an Afghan sector, though part of the audio degraded mid-transmission. She switched to analogue fallback mode for only a second before it cut out. What she heard made her freeze. It was brief. Garbled. A clipped, half-buried line in the static, distorted by interference—yet unmistakably deliberate. Human. And it hadn’t been meant for her. The transmission ended almost as soon as it began. No timestamp. No signature. But it was enough. Enough for her to recognize what it might mean.
Lawson was the only one who noticed. The only one who knew.
The Russians accidentally left a trace of something.
It might have been nothing. It could be a coincidence. But in the marrow of her bones, she knew better. If she reported it, Carter would know. And if Carter knew, he would act. She could practically hear his voice already: Trace the leak. Find the Russians.
Kill them.
And perhaps that was what she was meant to do.
And yet—
She remained seated, still. Eyes fixed on the monitor’s dim glow, hands hovering above the keys, as if the act of typing might transform her irrevocably. Her pulse drummed faintly in her ears. Her mouth was dry. And for the first time in years, she felt no desire to be right.
It was not fear.
She had known fear. Real fear—its cold, surgical efficiency. Fear was a useful thing: it could be categorised, packed into your ribs, used like fuel. But this was something else.
This was guilt.
And guilt, she knew, was different. It lingered. It did not strike. It seeped. It sank into the sinew and stayed there. It was not provoked by what one might do—but by what one already was.
She had signed papers that consigned names to silence. She had averted her gaze when unsanctioned methods extended beyond their mandate. She had smokes with Carter over glasses of bourbon while ash still rained from buildings his orders had razed. That was her. That was the woman who now sat in this cold little room, hands motionless above a keyboard, paralysed not by uncertainty—but by the sudden, terrible flicker of conscience.
Sudden. Unbidden. Unwelcome.
Unwillingly, her eyes drifted across the second monitor, to the line of letters blinking steadily in the corner of an encrypted file.
Abdulayev’s location.
A time of departure. A date of departure. A country of arrival.
A man whose hands had orchestrated a thousand unmarked graves.
The proof lay before her. No alarms, no tribunals, no necessity for spectacle. Only a string of numbers and a name. Enough to end everything—or begin something else entirely.
She could send it to Medvedev.
The thought appeared suddenly, quietly—like a sin whispered in church.
She could betray Carter. Not in theory, abstraction, or in some distant hypothetical. But here, now. She could route it through a foreign server, burn the credentials, scrub the metadata. She had done more with less. If she chose, the act would leave no trace. The choice was very real. The question, then, was not how. It was should.
Was it a sin—to hand over the coordinates of a man whose legacy was built on terror and death? A man whose survival prolonged cycles of violence that spilled across borders? Or was the sin in betrayal itself—in the severing of a vow, no matter its object? Did the morality lie in the outcome, or in the fidelity to the oath? What, in the end, was treason? The forsaking of duty—or the forsaking of conscience? And if she sent the file—if she gave Abdulayev’s location to men who would, without question, kill him—what did that make her? An instrument of justice? Or simply an executioner at one remove? To deal in life and death so easily—was that its own transgression?
She had not pulled triggers. But she had moved information, diverted orders, adjusted timelines—and people had died for it. People with names, families, histories. People who, perhaps, had done far less than Abdulayev ever had. She had consigned them to silence with the stroke of a key, the send of a message. So what right did she have now to hesitate? What claim did she have to guilt, when she had worn its absence like a second skin for so long? Had she been forsaking her conscience all this time for the sake of duty? Or had duty become the cloak beneath which her conscience quietly starved? And if now—after all this—some shard of conscience stirred at last, was it redemption? Or hypocrisy? And wasn’t it a sin to deny your conscience?
She pressed her palms to her face. The room felt smaller now, the walls pressing in. No movement. No air. Just the cursor blinking in silence, as if waiting for her verdict.
Conscience or cowardice?
Action or decay?
She no longer trusted herself to tell the difference between right and necessary. Between principle and self-interest. Between justice and revenge.
But what she did know was that she could not sit still. Something took control of her—what it was, she may never know—but her body stood. Slowly. As if the decision had to rise through her limbs like something physical. Her hands moved without certainty, without permission—just momentum. She opened the secure network and began a fresh relay route.
A channel Carter’s team had cracked only days ago. A feat she was a part of.
It was rebel chatter. Temporary access—meant only to trace insurgent movements around Noorullah’s compound so they could leak to the Taliban for the base invasion. Reports showed that the Taliban could not hold onto the base. So maybe someone still manned it—some loyalist hiding in the dust. Knowing the nature of insurgents—they would be gathering what they had left from the base. So, she masked the signal with a foreign server tag, rerouted through a civilian satellite node in Herat, and burned every credential she had.
Then she wrote it.
MEDVEDEV,
R. ABDULAYEV.
D.O.D. 03.05.2023.
T.O.D. 0400.
SYRIA.
That was it. No names beyond his. No flourish. No plea. Just the truth, as clean and cold as a kill order.
Syria.
Lawson knew that was where Abdulayev was located. Carter had refused any digital trail. Had made it clear that even he didn’t want the details stored. “Even I don’t wanna know,” he’d said with a cigarette hanging from his mouth, paranoia masked as discipline. He was a safety addict. A control freak. A man who believed nothing was safe unless it was buried—and nothing was buried unless it was completely deniable.
So that was all Lawson could give them.
A single country.
But they pulled Nazarov from the dirt like a buried sin. They made Jannat into a spectacle, a sermon in blood. Lawson knew the only variable now was time. Not outcome. Give them the name of a country, and the rest would follow. In their eyes, justice had no borders.
She hovered for only a second.
Then hit send.
The cursor blinked. The file vanished.
And in the silence that followed, Rebecca Lawson sat still, unable to name what she felt.
She expected something. Perhaps not redemption, but a reaction. A catharsis, a jolt of guilt, a shiver of release. Or some other emotion that would grab her by the throat and constrict her breathing like exoneration or horror. But nothing came. Not yet. The silence did not weigh, but simply existed. In that numbness, she found something far worse: ambiguity. She had committed an act, that by any metric, be it legal, moral, or professional, constituted a betrayal. But it did not feel like one—but nor did it feel like justice.
It only felt like procedure.
As if, in the act of pressing send, she had not committed anything at all—but merely resumed a function long since automated. She had thought—no, she had foolishly, pathetically hoped that she would feel righteous or manifestly changed. But the moment passed and she was still herself. She was still here. She was still.
Perhaps this was her punishment—to remain untouched by the very fire she had helped to ignite. To remain intact while others burned. Did she hope to burn with them? Did she hope to be punished?
No—
For she remembered the papers and articles with photos of Nazarov’s body, beaten to near unrecognisability. She remembered the Mephistophelian eyes of the killer, slowly slicing Jannat’s throat open, each movement drawn out with cruel precision.
But then she remembered the cold words of the men behind the mask.
Consequences are not whispers in the wind. They are not distant echoes you can ignore. They are the immutable law.
No.
She did not want to be punished. Not in the way they punished.
She wanted the punishment of the novels and stories—existential suffering behind closed doors, the soft tragedy of a soul rotting quietly in its own remorse. She wanted to feel haunted, wanted to feel as if she could write in philosophical confessions about the ruins of herself and pretend that was enough.
But this world did not deal in such punishments.
The punishments of this world had hands. They had gloves and wires and silence. They had faces that did not blink. They had blunt instruments and one-way corridors. They had bones shattered in a back alley. They had throats slit open, jagged and sharp, blood flooding a concrete floor where no one would ever mop it. They had electricity and water. They had steel rebars and extension cords and sacks pulled over heads. They had time to spend, and none to waste. That was what this world was. That was what death looked like when it came without pretense, without courtrooms or flags or ceremony. It was not the quiet, noble ending of men in literature—it was what happened when no one was watching. When no one was coming. And now, for the first time in her life, it felt close. Not symbolic. Not theoretical. Real.
Behind all her keystrokes and codes, she had almost forgotten it could reach her. That people like her could be touched. She had lived too long behind glass. Behind terminals and terminals and terminals—moving names, leaking files, watching outcomes unfold in distant places she’d never seen. The line between act and result had been so diluted it felt fictional.
Everything was simply procedure to her.
And, perhaps, that was why she sent the file.
Not for justice. Not for conscience. But because she feared them. Because she had seen what they did to those who stood in their way, betrayed them, failed them. Because perhaps, deep in some corner of her—some shrinking, cowardly core—she had hoped they would spare her.
Pathetically.
Pathetically, she had imagined the Spetsnaz commander seeing the name, the coordinates, the country, and saying—This one helped us. This one may be useful. Leave her.
It was laughable. Stupid. Naïve in the worst way. But it had not felt like naïveté when she pressed send. It had felt like survival. And can one be punished for fighting to survive? Can one be condemned for clawing their way to the surface when the world is drowning? For gasping, grabbing, trampling whatever hand was beneath, just to breathe a little longer? Was that a sin? Was this survival?
No matter how she turned it, it was not justice. Not in her heart. It was not redemption. Not in her heart.
It was a bargain made in fear. An unspoken deal struck in the heart—one life for another.
Take him. Leave me.
And wasn’t that the oldest sin of all?
Not betrayal.
Cowardice.
Suddenly, a sound—
A shift so slight it might have passed for a trick of the ear in any other moment, the faint displacement of air, the subtle pressure of presence, the inaudible click of a door that had not been opened with force but with care, with precision, with intention. And with it, as though summoned by the very weight of her fear, came the presence she had not prepared herself to face.
She turned. And behind her—standing in the doorframe like a verdict—was Carter.
Calm, composed. His expression unreadable not because it was blank, but because it was full of the quiet recognition reserved only for the most intimate of betrayals. For there, in that terrible stillness, she understood—he had known. He had seen now. Not what she had done, not yet to its full extent. But that she had done something. Something that shifted the current, even if only slightly. And in this place, in this room, in this operation—slight was enough.
Her breath, which only moments ago had caught in her throat from the tension of moral crisis, now caught for another reason entirely: the realisation that all of it—the fear, the guilt, the anguish, the self-justification, the desperate accounting of right and wrong—had not prepared her for this moment, where the abstract collapsed into the immediate. Where the grand tragedy of conscience she had allowed herself to feel became grotesquely irrelevant, flattened by the crude, inescapable reality of consequence. Because now it was not her mind that was unraveling—it was the illusion that she had ever been in control. Her thoughts, so careful in their construction, so weighted with significance, had given her the false comfort of meaning. But standing here, in the presence of the man she had feared and followed in equal measure, she saw that it had always been a performance for herself only—words recited before the gallows, as if eloquence might soften the drop.
They had told the world that Every step is counted. Every breath weighed. But to her mind—her selfish, unholy mind—they were directed to her. Your efforts to outrun fate only tighten the noose around your neck. This is the nature of consequence—it is a hunter that never tires. There would be no quiet atonement written in some hidden journal, no message or legacy to be left so that she may be remembered sympathetically. There would only be this: the cold stare of a man who had always known the rules of this world better than she ever did.
So, she did not speak. She simply stood, motionless, in that dim, humming room. The monitors blinked. The cursor still pulsed at the edge of the screen, as though mocking the very notion that her actions had been hers alone. But now, she had been stripped of all illusions: her sin was not merely betrayal. Her sin, too, had been the hope that it would not be punished.
He stepped forward. Not with force, not with fury—but with the slow, unhurried movement of a man who had already arrived at his conclusion long before she ever acted.
“Rebecca,” he said, almost gently, like a man saying a name at a funeral. “You know what I always liked most about folks like you?”
She bit back a gasp.
He did not wait for an answer. The question was ornamental, like a wreath laid over a closed casket.
“It’s not your intelligence. Ain’t your skills. Sure as hell ain’t your loyalty,” he gestured faintly, flicking his wrist. “All that can be bought. Trained. Replaced. Or broken, if need be. No—what I liked,” he said, voice softening into something that might have been real, “was that you believed the oath meant something.”
He stepped closer.
“You actually believed that there was a kind of moral arithmetic to all this. That if you followed the rules, if you kept your hands clean and your paperwork filed, if you did everything the right way—then someone would come along and judge in your favour. That somebody would say: she did right. She played fair. She oughta be spared. ”
There was no venom in his tone. Only pity.
“But then you broke it,” he continued, his voice soft, almost regretful. “You shattered the oath. You crossed the line you thought sacred. And for what? Not justice. Not for some cause.”
He sighed.
“No, Rebecca. You did it ‘cause you thought it’d save you.”
He gave a faint, mournful shake of his head.
“That’s the part that makes you pitiful. Not that you turned on us—we’ve had worse. It’s that you still thought the rules would protect you after you broke ‘em. Like you could lie and still be trusted. Like you could spit on the oath and still hide behind it.”
A pause. A silence that echoed.
“You weren’t wrong to be afraid,” he said at last. “You were just wrong thinkin’ that’d be enough to save you.”
Carter’s gaze lingered on her for a long moment. Then, with a slowness that felt almost ceremonial, he reached into his coat. He did not panic, he did not raise his voice. There was the simply dull click of leather, the whisper of fabric shifting, and then the unmistakable weight of a steel drawn from a holster. A sidearm—standard issue. Polished. Personal.
Mostly unused.
He did not raise it right away. He held it low, almost casually, watching the glint of light that flashed threateningly.
Lawson did not move. Not because she was brave, or that she stood for what she did, and certainly not because she had accepted anything. But because, for once, she finally understood what it meant to be powerless—not in theory, not in fear, but in fact.
“It ain’t personal. It never was.”
He raised the gun to her forehead.
“But it is a damn shame.”
And shot.
A muffled, internal sound. A red bloom appeared high between her brows—small, precise, almost surgical—and for a half-second, her eyes remained open, not wide with shock, but flat. Unregistering. Then her body collapsed. But there was no grace, no poetry. She dropped like a marionette whose strings had been cut, limbs giving way all at once. A slack thud followed, harsh and final. Her skull struck the concrete with a sickening knock, one leg bent beneath her at a strange angle, as if she had stumbled and simply never caught herself.
The cursor on the screen kept blinking. The room hummed. The file was long gone.
Carter stood still a moment longer. Then he holstered the bloody weapon and exhaled.
No satisfaction. No regret.
Simply procedure.