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She went quiet.

A delivery skiff turned the corner below and disappeared into the crowd.

Then I heard her move. She stopped a stride behind me. “Maybe that’s okay.”

I looked back. “What?”

“Not knowing yet.”

My first instinct was to reject that. Uncertainty was a flaw.

In the field, uncertainty got warriors killed. It broke plans and created openings for threats. But Talia was not a battlefield.

No matter how often I tried to make the same rules apply.

I looked back toward the terminal. Toward the false timeline. Toward the architecture I had trusted for eight years.

The Veil had been built on compartmentalization because no individual should hold the whole.

I had accepted that as strength. Now I saw the weakness.

If every operative saw only fragments, corruption could live between them.

A false packet could look valid. A fabricated target could look dangerous. A termination order could arrive through channels designed to discourage questions.

And a Ghost loyal enough to obey would never know he had been weaponized against an innocent person.

My hand tightened against the window frame.

“Veyr.”

I turned.

Talia watched my hand, not my face. She already knew.

I returned to the terminal and opened a restricted diagnostic layer I had never accessed outside formal mission review.

Talia came closer. “What are you doing?”

“Investigating the Veil.”

She went still.

Until now, I had been investigating a bad mission. A corrupted order. Something external that had entered the structure. This was different.

Now the structure itself was under suspicion. And I was the one opening it.

Talia moved around the table and stood beside me.

“What happens if they know?”

“They already know I failed to comply.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

I looked at her.

“They will classify me as compromised.”