Page 107

“I know.” She was already up, already moving. “But it gives us a path.”

The common room was too narrow for it. Four steps toward the window, a turn, then three back toward the food-preparation area because the table interrupted the direct route.

“Sera’n worked with deceased-warrior specimens,” she said. “We already know that. Which means somebody doing legitimate reproductive research could request archived biological material from military storage.”

“Yes.”

“But the lab doesn’t necessarily receive the full original identity with the sample.”

“Depending on classification.”

“Exactly.” She came back to the table and braced both hands on it, leaning over the terminal. “Think about the transfer process. If someone changes the identity before accession—swaps the identifier, alters the manifest—the technician receiving the specimen only knows what the system tells them they have. They have no reason to question it.”

I watched her. “The military archive would still retain the original source.”

“Right.” She tapped one finger against the table. “The archive keeps the truth. But the reproductive lab gets something else—a different identifier, a different manifest, maybe even a different reason for the transfer entirely.” She straightened, arms folded. “That’s how you hide a living man inside a dead man’s records.”

“You discovered the discrepancy.”

“Because somebody got sloppy.” She tapped the table. “Khar’en’s sample.”

I remembered the identifier.

Specimen 771-4A.

Manifest 771-9C.

A clerical discrepancy, according to the original explanation. It no longer looked clerical.

Talia looked at me. “That was the first thing I found. The sample number didn’t match the transfer manifest.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“That maybe the records aren’t the only things being relabeled.”

The ventilation system hummed through the silence.

Outside, a transport descended somewhere behind the building, close enough that the window vibrated once in its frame.

I looked at the reconstructed identifiers again.

Ghosts. Dead men. Archived biological samples. Human compatibility records. The connection remained incomplete. But it existed.

“What possible purpose would there be for that?” I asked, my voice low. The ventilation hum seemed to grow louder in the pause that followed.

Talia’s shoulders tightened almost imperceptibly. “I don’t know yet.”

“Then we do not invent one where none is evident.”

“I’m not inventing.” Her tone carried an edge now, a blade honed by fatigue and frustration. I watched her draw a slow breath before continuing, her gaze fixed on the screen between us. “I’m tracing the pattern of what’s actually here. Altered compatibility values. Dead-warrior records that behave like living ones. Biological samples with manifests that don’t match. Ghost identifiers surfacing in reproductive files where they should be impossible.” She finally looked up from the terminal, her eyes holding mine. “These aren’t four separate problems anymore.”

No. They were not.

I turned the terminal toward myself and entered the identifier belonging to the operative I recognized.

The offline system returned only the information stored locally. Operational status. No mission detail. No current location.

I opened his biological cross-reference.