Best Public Ending

You call Mercer with specifics, not panic: route names, vehicle position, proof in hand, chamber below the tower, live movement tonight. Because you already did the field work, she can act fast and clean. The honest people she still trusts arrive without warning the wrong ones. The ring at Hollow Pine breaks before dawn with ledgers, stolen survey material, vehicle records, and live arrests to pin the story in place. Your brother makes it out alive, exhausted and angry but breathing. When the report goes public, it cannot bury what happened because too many parts of it now exist outside the official version. For once, the truth leaves the woods at the same time you do.