The desert didn’t care about politics.
It stretched beyond Cairo in scorched waves, long and flat and blinding. The kind of place where heat shimmered like breath, and sound vanished before it could become an echo.
Alon stood beside the wreckage of their safe vehicle, smoke curling up into the hard blue sky. The engine block was a mangled knot of metal, plastic, and flame-kissed rubber. There’d been no warning. No shadow across the road. Just the hiss of pressure and the sudden, surgical roar of a directional charge.
They’d been lucky.
If you could call crawling from burning steel lucky.
Beside him, Nora wiped blood from her temple with the edge of her scarf. A shallow gash, nothing broken. Her pulse was steady. Her silence even more so.
They didn’t speak as they moved away from the road, into the scrubland. Sun scorching their shoulders. Sand tugging at their boots.
Someone had burned them.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
Two hours earlier, they’d been in a café near Midan Sayyida Zeinab. A hole-in-the-wall place where the tea came black and bitter, and the ceiling fan didn’t move enough air to matter.
They’d been watching the upload stats from Lina’s broadcast.
Silent. Focused.
And then the alert came.
Not on their primary comms.
But through the old channel.
The one no one was supposed to know still existed.
The message was short.
BURN NOTICE: REGEV. BEN-MEIR. RETRIEVAL AUTHORIZED. TERMINATION PENDING.
It came signed.
Not with a name.
With a glyph.
A half-circle. Broken. Sable red.
Alon had stared at the screen like it was a confession.
“They’re done pretending.”
Nora had folded the tablet shut. “Then so are we.”
Now, under the hard sun, they climbed an outcrop of rock and scanned the horizon. Nothing but emptiness and a long ribbon of road disappearing west.
Alon checked the signal jammer clipped to his belt. Still active. Five minutes of clean silence left before every satellite overhead started whispering again.
Nora pulled a folded map from her bag, paper, not digital, and traced their position with her fingertip.
“Next safehouse is thirty-eight kilometers. Bedouin land. We can make it before dark if we move now.”
Alon didn’t respond right away.
He was staring at the sky.
Listening.
Not for a drone.
But for something older.
“Do you remember Paris?” he asked suddenly.
Nora blinked. “Which part?”
“The bridge. The café with the cat that kept stealing your croissant.”
A flicker of something passed across her face.
“I remember.”
“Do you?”
She looked at him.
And for the first time in days, something fragile entered her voice.
“I remember the taste of the coffee. The cat’s fur. The rain on the awning. I remember us.”
Alon nodded slowly.
“Then they haven’t taken you. Not yet.”
They reached the safehouse just after sunset.
A low stone structure buried in the side of a hill, half-disguised as a ruin. No electricity. No surveillance. Just old walls and deeper trust.
Inside, the air was cooler. Smelled of dust and spent gunpowder.
Alon checked the perimeter while Nora lit the oil lamp.
It glowed soft and golden, catching on her cheekbones, warming the room like a memory.
She sat. Quiet. Folded.
“I’m not ready to forget,” she said.
“You won’t,” Alon replied. “I won’t let them.”
She looked up. “What if they already started?”
He knelt in front of her. Took her hand.
“Then we tear the code apart line by line.”
That night, while she slept, Alon worked in silence.
He connected the drive Leah had given him. Ran diagnostics. Cross-referenced the encryption with the old Sable directives.
He found something buried beneath it all.
A ghost string. A backchannel tunnel.
Not just one.
A network.
Laid in place years ago. Dead circuits hidden in embassy floors, consulate firewalls, refugee camp routers. And every one of them pointed to the same directive:
SABLE//REGENESIS
He stared at the screen until his eyes blurred.
Then a second message arrived.
Asset Reactivated. Extraction Team Deployed.
And below it:
NORA BEN-MEIR: PRIORITY ALPHA.
They weren’t just trying to erase her.
They were trying to rebuild her.
Into something that wouldn’t remember him at all.