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Behind me, Talia remained quiet. I looked at her reflection. She was studying the reconstructed records again.
Her earlier agitation had disappeared. The danger had not changed. Nothing about our situation was safer than it had been five minutes ago. But now she had a trail.
I was beginning to understand why that mattered to her. Not because she believed information guaranteed control. Because information gave her something to act on.
I recognized the impulse. Mine simply looked different.
I reached for weapons. Talia reached for patterns.
She looked up from the terminal. “What?”
I had not realized I was staring. I turned back toward the display.
“Nothing.”
Her eyebrows rose, and she waited, one finger still resting on the edge of the screen.
I corrected myself before she could object. “Someone did not stumble across these identities.”
Her expression sobered, the earlier question gone. “No.”
“They were collected.” She looked back at the three reconstructed identifiers, her mouth pulling thin at one corner.
“Yes.”
The word settled heavily between us. Collected.
Not exposed by one compromised record. Not discovered by accident.
Collected.
I returned to the table and sat beside the terminal. Talia enlarged the accession fields again without looking up, her thumb tracing the margin of the screen where the dates sat.
“If they were collecting Ghost samples or identities, there has to be a reason,” she said.
“There is.”
“You don’t know what it is.”
“No.”
“Neither do I.” She turned one hand over, palm open.
“That has not stopped you before.”
Her mouth tilted faintly at the corner. “I’m growing.”
I almost smiled. She caught it anyway, her eyes lifting from the display.
“You did it again.”
“I did nothing.”
“Sure.”
The moment lasted only seconds.
Then her attention returned to the data. “What do we do next?”
