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We had barely spoken.

It was strange how loud silence became after you had learned someone’s rhythms.

Veyr sat near the front window with one terminal angled toward him. He had chosen the same position he always did—clear view of the entrance, partial view of the road, weapon within reach.

I worked at the table.

Separate screen. Separate investigation. Separate everything.

That was intentional.

After our argument, I had expected him to hover. To decide my emotional distance made me vulnerable. To make sure I didn’t leave because the Veil knew where we had been and Central Review still wanted me.

He hadn’t.

When I closed the door, he stayed outside. When I came back, he didn’t demand an explanation.

No argument.

No warning about what I should or shouldn’t access.

That should have made me feel better.

Instead it made me miss him, which was deeply irritating.

Between Veyr’s offline archive and the storage module he had pulled before we fled, I still had most of the records we had been reconstructing. It held the working archive we had built over the past several days—records, access trails, Sera’n’s reconstructed patterns, everything Veyr had refused to leave behind digitally even if we abandoned everything else physically.

I stared at a column of accession dates harder than necessary.

Focus.

The problem in front of me was easier than the one sitting twelve feet away.

Numbers had rules.

People apparently came with concealed compartments and eight years of unresolved grief.

I could work with numbers.

I had been rebuilding Sera’n’s comparison set from memory for almost two hours. Not the exact files. That was impossible.

But the shape of what he had been doing.

Warrior identifiers. Compatibility changes. Sample transfers. Administrative events. Royal classification markers. Anything that repeated.

I added another row.

One of the altered files had been touched three times over six years. The first change looked minor: compatibility index adjustment. The second coincided with a reassignment. The third came after a biological-sample transfer.

I highlighted the access field.

Different users each time.

That seemed important.

Then I noticed something else.

A short identifier attached to the oldest change. Not an individual laboratory user. Too long for a department code. Too structured for an automated process.