The Last Known Position

The Cascades don't forgive mistakes. Iris Vega has built her career on that truth - eleven years coordinating wilderness search-and-rescue, reading the mountain like a language only she speaks. She knows where people vanish. She knows how to bring them back.

She doesn't know why they keep disappearing from the same impossible corridor.

Six experienced hikers. Nine weeks. Last-known positions that cluster along a route no public map shows - but that lines up precisely with an internal agency overlay marked INTERNAL USE ONLY: AVOID PUBLIC ROUTING. Someone is using rescue infrastructure as a weapon, funneling people into a blind spot engineered to swallow them whole.

The list of people with access is sixteen names. Iris's is one of them.

Working the case alone, off-book, she unravels a conspiracy older than her career, with a buyer patient enough to wait seasons. And the evidence says the next disappearance is already scheduled.

To stop it, she'll have to do the one thing her training forbids: vanish on purpose.

Strap in. This one doesn't let go.

TESTING