I leaned over and picked up a small black wireless printer that had either fallen down in that gap or been deliberately moved out of sight. A single LED blinked amber. My heart pounded. “I need a blank sheet of paper.”

Deb handed one to me. I set the printer down as carefully as an armed bomb, fed the paper into the top, pressed the OK button, and hoped.

The printer hummed to life and tugged the paper through. “Keeler sent whatever he was working on to the printer. With no paper, the printer held it in memory. His killers destroyed his hard drive and cellphone, but who’s going to bother—”

The paper finished printing and fell into my hands. The light kept blinking. “There’s more.”

Deb fed more paper into the machine while I read the first lines of Alexander Keeler’s final document. I read them a second time, then a third, trying to comprehend. Trying and failing to reconcile everything I’d thought, everything I’d assumed, with Keeler’s words.

Lena touched my arm.

“I was wrong,” I whispered numbly. “He didn’t go to the prison to check on their work. He went to expose it.”

Keeler had been drafting a press release about the Virginia facility. Phrases like “trampling Constitutional freedom” and “betrayal of American ideals” jumped out at me. He’d been working to expose them, the same as us.

This was the same man who’d championed the RAMPART Act, seeking to register and detain inhumans as well as libriomancers and other magic-users. But Keeler had wanted these things done openly, in full view and with the approval of the American people. As I kept reading, I started to see that no matter how much the man had hated and feared those of us with magic, he hated government secrecy and overreach even more. “It says he was tipped off by a source within the Department of Homeland Security.”

“The Coast Guard reports to DHS,” Deb said quietly.

I grabbed the next page of Keeler’s letter, which discussed “secret abductions and unethical experimentation” as well as the “deliberate fueling of tension and hostility in regards to magic” and “plans for a bigger, deadlier attack, intended to unite the world against inhumans and magic-users.”

I hadn’t liked the man, and he’d never bothered to hide his hostility toward me, but he’d died trying to do the right thing. When this was over, I was going to make sure people knew it.

My jaw beeped. I jumped hard enough I pulled something in my back. I had to get Talulah to turn down the intensity on that damn communicator. Then maybe we could add a caller ID function. “Hello?”

“Isaac? It’s Jason.” I tensed. The last time I’d heard him so somber was when he’d been getting ready to fire me. “Nidhi’s gone.”