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“Not necessarily one,” I said. “It could be a coordinated group.”

“Possible,” she conceded, but her eyes narrowed slightly as she looked from the screen to me. “Or it could be someone so high up that the walls between those systems are just… suggestions.” She held my gaze, waiting. “Someone for whom compartments don’t exist.”

I let the silence stretch, my lack of immediate denial hanging in the air between us. It was answer enough.

Talia leaned back. “Could whoever sent you after me have that kind of access?”

The question landed precisely where it should have.

I thought of the mission packet.

Black priority. Termination authority. The handler refusing to confirm Crown authorization. The instruction preventing Talia from contacting royal authority. The legacy architecture that had queried the mountain site.

I had spent years trusting compartmentalization because it prevented one compromised source from contaminating another. But someone had crossed those walls already.

I could no longer assume the mission packet stood outside the same pattern simply because it had arrived through Veil channels.

“I no longer have enough evidence to exclude it.” The words fell between us like a stone into still water. Talia stared at me, her earlier intensity cooling into something more measured. Her lips parted slightly before she finally breathed out a single, soft “Oh.”

I shut down the active query, the screen dimming, though I left the reconstructed records glowing on the display between us. The light caught the tension in her shoulders as she leaned forward again.

“You think whoever sent you could be connected,” she said, not quite a question.

“I think the possibility must be investigated,” I replied, my voice low.

A faint, almost imperceptible smile touched her mouth. “That is the most Veyr way possible to say yes.”

“It is not yes.”

Her gaze held mine, and when she spoke again, her voice had gone quieter, more intimate in the humming stillness of the room. “No. But it isn’t no anymore.”

She was right. Again.

I stood and returned to the window.

Not directly in front of it.

To the side, where the dark glass gave me a reflection of part of the room behind my shoulder.

Outside, the trading district continued as though none of this mattered.

A vendor was closing a stall beneath a striped awning. Two workers argued beside a parked freight carrier. Someone carried a small child across the street while balancing a parcel against one hip.

Visible lives. Ordinary problems. Names that existed in one place. My entire existence depended on the opposite.

Compartmentalization.

One system held mission designations.

Another biometrics.

Another legal death records.

No single failure should have been capable of exposing the whole. That was what the Veil had been designed to prevent. Someone had connected my dead military identity to my living operational identifier. Then placed that connection inside reproductive data.

Someone had done the same with other Ghosts. That was not leakage. Leakage was accidental.

This had structure. Intent.