Author's Preface
Cassian didn't sleep. He sat in his room with the number from Renner's phone glowing in his memory like something branded there, and at half past five, before the sun had properly cleared the rooftops, he heard it — the soft, deliberate click of the back door, and his mother's careful footsteps crossing the kitchen below, the specific quiet of someone trying very hard not to wake a house they think is still sleeping.
He found her at the kitchen table in her coat, still buttoned, a mobile phone clutched in both hands, staring at nothing. She startled so violently when he said her name that the phone clattered out of her grip and onto the table between them, screen lit, and Cassian saw, in the half-second before she snatched it back, a name at the top of an open message thread that stopped his heart cold in his chest.
Tom.
His father's name.
"Mum." His voice came out barely above a whisper. "Who were you just texting."
Karla's face did something complicated and terrible — the specific unraveling of a person who has spent weeks holding an enormous weight perfectly still, only to have it finally, catastrophically slip.
"Cassian, sit down. Please. I need to explain, and I need you to let me get through it before you say anything, because if I stop I don't know if I'll be able to start again."
He sat. His whole body had gone cold and very still, the way it had in Renner's kitchen a few hours ago, the way it seemed to go now every time the ground shifted beneath this family.
"Your father isn't dead," Karla said, and even though Cassian had already half-known it, already built the theory alone in the dark of his room, hearing it said out loud in his mother's own voice landed like a physical blow. "He's been alive this whole time. I have known since the week of the funeral."
"You buried an empty casket." His voice cracked. "You let me stand there and cry over nothing."
"I didn't have a choice." Her hands were shaking now, wrapped tight around the phone like it was the only solid thing left in the room. "Cassian, your father came to me three days before the funeral and told me he was in danger — real danger, the kind he couldn't explain fully, only that it involved your grandfather, and something your grandfather had done years ago, business dealings he'd never told any of us about, people he owed things to that don't forgive debts quietly. He told me the only way to keep you and me safe was for the rest of the world to believe he was already gone. He said if whoever was coming for him thought they'd already succeeded, they'd stop looking. He said it was the only way to protect us."
"So you let me grieve him for a month." Cassian's voice had gone thin and furious, three days of fear finally curdling into something sharper. "You let me stand at a funeral for a man who was alive. You let Gran cry herself sick over a son who wasn't even in the ground."
"I know." Karla's own voice broke completely now, tears spilling freely down a face gone grey with exhaustion. "I have hated myself every single day for it. I have wanted to tell you a thousand times, and every single time I stopped myself, because he made me promise — he said the moment anyone else knew, even you, even his own mother, the danger would come straight for you next. I chose to protect you by lying to you. I don't know anymore if that was the right choice. I don't know if there was a right choice at all."
Cassian sat with the wreckage of it, his whole understanding of the last month reorganizing itself violently around this new, enormous fact. Grandad's actual death — real, final, no closed-casket trick there, his mother confirmed through fresh tears — had happened six days after the fake funeral, and it was that death, the real one, that had apparently convinced his father the danger was worse than he'd first believed, bad enough that he'd gone further underground rather than surfacing again.
"Renner," Cassian said suddenly, the name landing between them like something dropped. "Dad called him three days before the crash. Twelve minutes. I saw it on his phone."
His mother's face went, if possible, even paler.
"I don't know anything about Renner," she said, and something in her voice — raw, frightened, entirely unpracticed at this particular lie — told Cassian she was telling the truth, at least about that. "Your father doesn't tell me everything, Cassian. He calls sometimes, texts, always careful, always brief, always terrified someone's tracing it. I don't know who he's been in contact with. I only know he's alive, and he's frightened, and he told me two days ago that something was coming to a head — that whatever this was, it was going to finish soon, one way or another."
"Is he behind this?" Cassian's voice had gone very quiet, very careful, the question he'd been circling since Renner's kitchen finally forced into open air. "Mum. Is Dad the one making all of this happen?"
"No." Karla said it instantly, fiercely, with a certainty that startled him. "No. Whatever else is true, your father would never — Cassian, he's spent a month in hiding specifically because he's frightened of whoever's actually responsible. He's not orchestrating this. He's running from it. There's a difference, even if I understand why you can't see it clearly right now."
Cassian wanted, badly, to believe her. But three days of watching everyone he loved wear a version of the truth calibrated exactly to what they wanted him to believe had taught him something he couldn't unlearn now, sitting in this kitchen at dawn.
"Then who's your text thread with him actually about," he said slowly. "Just now. Before I came down. What did he say?"
Karla's hand tightened around the phone, and for a long, terrible moment, she didn't answer, and Cassian watched something pass across her face that he recognized instantly, because he'd been wearing a version of it himself for three days straight.
Fear. Not of him. Of what she was about to say.
"He told me not to let you get on that plane tomorrow," she said finally, barely above a whisper. "He said if you get on that plane, he can't protect you anymore. He said—" Her voice cracked entirely now, the phone trembling in her grip. "He said he already tried to stop it once, and it didn't work, and he doesn't think he can stop it a second time."
The kitchen went utterly silent, the words settling into the space between them with an unbearable weight, and Cassian felt the whole shape of the mystery lurch sideways yet again, the ground he'd thought he was finally standing on giving way beneath him one more time.
He already tried to stop it once.
Not I will try. Not I'm going to. Already. Past tense. As if his father, wherever he was hiding, had somehow lived through some version of this exact unraveling before — as if the loop Cassian had assumed belonged only to him, and now to Zack, might not be theirs alone after all.
"Mum," Cassian said, very slowly, very carefully, "how many times has Dad said something like that to you? Not just today. Since the funeral. Has he ever said anything before about trying to stop something, and it not working?"
Karla stared at him, and in her face, Cassian watched a new and different fear arrive — not fear of the danger itself, but fear of a question she had never let herself properly ask.
"Twice," she said quietly. "He's said something like that to me twice before. Both times I thought he meant it figuratively. Cassian—" Her voice had gone very small now, very frightened, in a way that made Cassian's stomach drop through the floor. "What if he didn't mean it figuratively at all?"