Chapter Text
Vogel - Unknown Trinity Location
Vogel sat at the centre of the glass table, spine squared. Across the surface, three black tablets flickered, each attended by a set of folded hands. They made no introductions.
The woman in the centre spoke first, voice dry, each word articulated for maximum clarity: “The operation was an unmitigated failure. The artefact was lost. Unacceptable field mortality.”
No one looked up. Vogel kept his eyes fixed on the wall behind them.
The woman: “Effective immediately, command of all remaining operations in the sector will transfer to Konstantin. You will brief him at 0800. Your clearance is rescinded to Beta level. Standard oversight applies.”
She slid a folder—actual paper, not digital—across the table. He took it without looking.
The second official asked, “Are you fit for ongoing duty?”
Vogel blinked once. “I am, sir.”
A pause. “Dismissed.”
He rose, inclined his head and exited. The door sighed shut behind him.
The corridor was empty. He let his breath out in one slow, unbroken exhale, then started for his quarters. The collar of his shirt already irritating his skin.
His room was as ordered: one bed, one lamp, a desk with three pens aligned by length. He stripped off the jacket, hung it by the loop, sat on the edge of the bed. He pulled the watch from his wrist and examined it. The face was flawless, unblemished, band cleaned and reassembled after the last incident. He placed it on the nightstand, aligned the twelve perfectly.
Against the nightstand, a framed photograph—two girls in matching sundresses, gap-toothed smiles frozen in time. The same picture he'd kept on Yamatai. Seven years had passed since he'd last seen them in person. Trinity’s rules remained unspoken but perfectly understood: deliver what they wanted, a successful mission and perhaps they would finally be able to see his daughters again.
He let himself sit, hands loose on his knees, eyes closed for a count of five.
The tomb did not replay for him; he had filed it away, with every other failure. What came back was not the collapse of the tomb, or the blood, or the pop of the bone in his leg. It was Croft’s hand on the axe, the way she had watched him—no compassion, not even hate, just frozen as she considered leaving him beneath the stone. The split-second where she balanced her options and chose to save him.
She could have left him. She should have left him. The question hung in his mind, unanswered. And before that—her in his tent on Yamatai. A calculated move, he knew. He'd caught her reaching for the satellite phone, fought against that raw, untrained ferocity. She'd been strong but predictable then. Until she wasn't.
"You must have been lonely here, Mathias," she'd said, voice low and calculating. He told himself she'd seduced him, though it stung his pride to be outmanoeuvred by someone half his age. Seven years of celibacy had worn his resistance thin as paper. She did have the initial advantage in their strange intimacy, as much as he hated to admit it, but the advantage had shifted when she lay pressed beneath him on that camp bed. He'd brushed the hair from her face, a gesture too intimate for what it was meant to be. When she'd turned her face to meet his gaze, something unguarded passed between them. Her body tightened, her inner walls fluttered around him and he recognised his own reflection in her brown eyes—a moment of vulnerability.
He remembered the grit of her hand on his shirt collar as she hauled him upright in the collapsing tomb, the flicker in her eyes when he did not thank her.
He opened his own, stared at the palm of his hand. Still faintly scored with dirt from the cave.
_________
Lara - London, England
Rain mutes London, flattening it to its usual grey. Lara sits on the living room floor, back to the couch, legs crossed, surrounded by the scatter of her father’s notebooks. The carpet of the flat is old, still holding the faint smell of a tobacco. She doesn’t mind, she finds it comforting. The desk lamp, set low, cut a sharp circle over her workspace. Around her, three stacks of note pads, a thumb drive, two chipped mugs—one abandoned to dregs, the other still warm. The laptop glows at her knees, the cursor waiting in the search bar.
She types the phrase again: “Trinity, Order of. Origins.” The returns were useless—no more than a handful of conspiracy theory aggregates, two dark-web links, and the same Wikipedia page she’d read five times already. She shuts the lid, run her hands through her hair, and exhales. Rain hammers the window pane. Outside, an ambulance crawled past, lights strobing blue across the flat’s walls.
She pulls the top notebook onto her lap. The edges are soft and worn. She thumbs the first page, then the second, letting her eyes absorb her father’s writing: lines, dates circled, whole paragraphs. She reads none of it, not really. Her mind has mapped each word, already memorised.
It wasn’t the answers that mattered. She was hunting for the next question.
Her side still throbs, a steady, unkind pulse. She ignores it, mostly, except when the muscles jump or her fingers drifted to the place just beneath her ribs, where the scab is thickest. She presses until the ache becomes sharp, then lets go. A test, every time, to see if she’ll still feel it.
She did.
She flips the notebook shut and rolls her shoulders, letting them pop. There’s no silence in London—just the steady rainfall, the distant sirens, her own shallow breaths. She opens the laptop again, keys in a new search: “Mathias Vogel.” Nothing. Not even a rumour. Trinity had cleaned up.
She pretends she doesn’t care.
A flicker of memory: the weight of him above her, the tent canvas shifting in the island breeze. His fingers brushing hair from her face, lingering a moment too long. Something in his eyes she couldn't name—or wouldn't. Not tenderness, exactly. More like recognition.
Sex had always been a tactical decision for Lara. Her first time with a random guy, a one night stand, whose name she barely remembered now— a box checked, a vulnerability addressed. The handful of encounters since then had been equally practical. Clinical, almost. She approached bodies like puzzles to be solved, then put away. Never once had she felt herself come undone.
Survival, she tells herself. That’s what had happened between them. A calculated risk. But the memory betrays her—the way she’d kissed him back, how she’d let him press her into that camp bed. She remembers the moment after, pulling her clothes on with trembling hands, the strange hollowness as she slipped from his tent into the jungle, as she heard him calling her name.
Her hand drifts to the small ridge beneath her skin, on the inside of her arm—the contraceptive implant she'd gotten before Yamatai. Insurance against the inconvenience of a period on her adventure. She never anticipated its other purpose. The doctor's exam stating a clean bill of health afterward had been expected. Seven years of isolation had at least ensured Vogel carried nothing but his own madness and demons.
She traces the edge of a notebook, remembering how his hands had felt against her skin. Strange, that amid all the violence and death, it was there—on a military cot in a makeshift camp—that intimacy had finally pierced her armour.
When she closes her eyes, the tomb flickered behind her eyelids. She remembered the heat of his arm slung over her neck, the raw, metallic taste of his breath. She remembered thinking, with utter clarity: if you save this man, he’ll kill you.
But that wasn’t just what replayed, it was the moment just before—the half-second after she freed his leg, when he stared up at her. No gratitude, no relief. Only the anticipation, the knowledge that she could leave him. That she almost did.
The question gnaws at her edges: why pull him from the rubble? A man whose hands were covered in blood. He may have not directly killed her father, but he had certainly caused it. She thinks back to their bodies pressed together in that tent, wondering if that misplaced intimacy had compromised her judgment. The thought makes her jaw tighten. She exhales slowly, trying not to examine it too closely.
She closed the laptop and set it aside.
The rain rattled harder. She curls forward, forehead pressing to her knees, and let the ache in her side drag her back to the present.
She whispered it, once, to the floor: “I should have left him.”
She remembers his warning: “be careful who you trust Lara.”
She sits back, wipes her face with both hands, and reopens the notebook. She uncaps a pen. She circles the word “Trinity” three times, the last so hard it tears the paper.