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I reached for the terminal. “We should continue.”

“Absolutely.” She leaned back. “Retreat into data. Very subtle.”

“I am not retreating.”

“Of course not.”

I ignored her and reopened the reconstructed comparison set.

She let me.

That mattered too.

The identifiers filled the screen again.

Mine.

Two others with the same underlying architecture. A fourth fragment too incomplete to verify.

Talia had already learned enough about the structure to understand that the operational portion marked something outside ordinary military classification. She knew what Ghost meant now.

What she did not know was how unusual it was for even one such identifier to appear outside restricted Veil systems. Three was impossible by accident.

I enlarged the second complete entry.

My fingers stopped. Talia noticed immediately.

“You know that one.”

There was no value in denying it again.

“I recognize the identifier.”

Her posture changed. “Another Ghost?”

“Yes.”

“Alive?”

“As far as I know.”

“Officially?”

“Dead.”

She absorbed that for several seconds, then looked at the third identifier. “And that one?”

“I do not recognize it.”

“But same structure?”

“Yes.”

Talia leaned closer to the screen. “So we have at least two men who are officially dead, actually alive, and working inside a classified program whose identifiers somehow ended up in reproductive records.”

“That is what the evidence suggests.”

“And nobody in a reproductive lab should even know those identifiers exist.”