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“Or suspected.” She turned the stylus between her fingers. “He tried to close doors before they noticed me.”

“Likely.”

“And it didn’t matter.”

I did not answer immediately.

Sera’n’s warning may have been the only reason she escaped before Review Enforcement reached her quarters.

“Maybe it mattered more than you think.”

Talia looked at me. Something in her expression softened. Then she looked away.

I returned my attention to the screen.

Talia’s repaired bag sat beside her chair. The drink I had given her was half empty. The authorization strips had migrated into two neat stacks between us without either of us deciding who would organize them.

One was hers.

One was mine.

I knew which was which.

That realization distracted me for exactly one second. Then I forced my attention back to the Veil routing markers.

For years, I had believed loyalty meant accepting that I would never see the whole.

Now I understood how easily trust without visibility could be manipulated.

Orders could be clean.

Systems could be valid.

Authorizations could pass every verification.

And still be false.

Somewhere in the past hour, without orders or discussion, Talia and I had stopped working beside each other and started working together.

That realization should have been secondary to everything on the screen.

It was not.

I looked once more at the hidden Veil bridge.

The mission had been fabricated.

The evidence had been built backward.

And someone with access to architecture I had trusted for eight years had helped make it possible.

For the first time since becoming Ghost, I understood that loyalty to an institution and loyalty to what was right might no longer be the same thing.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Talia

Veyr did not like being cared for.