Chapter 3: Fragments of the Dark
Over the next forty-eight hours, the tension in the house grew thick enough to choke on. Mary refused to sleep in the bed. Instead, she curled up in the corner of the walk-in closet, clutching a heavy iron fireplace poker.
David took time off work, keeping Leo home from school. He tried to piece together Mary’s fragmented ramblings. She spoke of a facility in upstate New York, of windowless vans, and of a ledger she had accidentally stumbled upon at her old accounting firm—the firm that was supposedly a front for an offshore shell company.
"It was just numbers, David," she muttered on the third night, staring blankly at the static on the television screen. "But the numbers added up to blood. Shipping containers. People. I saw the manifest. They knew I downloaded it."
"Where is the file now?" David asked, his heart hammering against his ribs.
Mary slowly turned her head, a grim, humorless smile playing on her chapped lips. "I swallowed it."
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David stared at her, horrified. "What?"
"A micro-SD card," she explained, her voice eerily calm. "Sealed in a polymer casing. I swallowed it the day they came for me. When they locked me in that basement, it passed. I cleaned it. I hid it." She reached into the lining of her tattered canvas jacket, which she refused to throw away, and pulled out a tiny, black square. "This is our death warrant, David. Or our ticket out."
