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“No one here is interested in your notes,” I had told him.

“That is irrelevant.”

“Then what is relevant?”

“That they are mine.”

I had laughed at him.

He had not understood why.

Sera’n did not leave his work open, ever. Unfinished procedures were never left unattended, and personal material was certainly never visible on a terminal anyone could access—he’d once given me a ten-minute lecture on information security after I mocked him for it, until I promised never to mention it again. Yet here it all was: his screen still active, a set of sample-reconciliation files glowing in the dim light.

I stared at them from across the room.

Don’t.

The warning came in his voice.

Close the records, Talia.

Fine.

I wasn’t opening records. I was walking. Entirely different.

I crossed the lab, and Merik looked up again, and I ignored him. The file on Sera’n’s screen looked ordinary at first—an active comparison set, deceased-warrior samples, compatibility-linked specimens, two reconciliations completed and a third halfway through review. But Sera’n’s notes weren’t routine. He had created a manual comparison column beside the system output, and when I leaned closer I saw what he had been tracking: different accession dates, repeated warrior identifiers, archived compatibility values sitting right beside current ones.

One entry had a short notation in Zunatorian I had to sound out under my breath.

“Pama...”

Change.

Modify.

I knew that word.

Another line had been marked with the equivalent of repeat pattern.

My pulse picked up.

This wasn’t work he’d started this morning—he’d been building something quietly for days, maybe longer. A comparison set, a pattern, the very kind I’d stumbled into yesterday. “You already knew,” I whispered, the words escaping before I realized I’d spoken them. Maybe not everything, maybe not why, but Sera’n had been looking too. These weren’t polished notes but working ones: a correction marked but not submitted, a sample still flagged for physical verification.

I frowned.

He would never leave a reconciliation half-finished if he knew he was being reassigned.

Maybe if there had been an emergency⁠—

I checked the tray beside the terminal.

Four specimens remained inside the tray, unprocessed and exposed. They hadn’t been stored, transferred, or even returned to refrigeration—a violation of every protocol Sera’n ever enforced. My unease sharpened into something colder, more certain. Then I saw it: the pendant, half-hidden beneath one of his data slates.

Small, dark metal, worn smooth along the edges from a lifetime of handling. I’d seen Sera’n touch it hundreds of times—when he was thinking through a problem, when a procedure went badly, once after receiving a personal message he deleted before I could ask. He never explained what it meant, and I never pressed. But I knew this much: it was always with him. Around his neck, tucked beneath his work clothes, held tightly in his hand. Never left behind on a table like forgotten clutter.

I picked it up. One side carried a faint etched mark I didn’t recognize—not military, not medical, just deeply personal. My throat tightened.

Sera’n might leave samples behind in an emergency, or leave a terminal unlocked if someone physically pulled him away from it. But he would not leave this. Not voluntarily—and that was worse, because Sera’n treated biological material like it was sacred. I had once watched him lecture a researcher twice his age for leaving a sealed specimen outside temperature control for seven minutes. A male who took that kind of care did not abandon four active samples without a reason, and there was no family waiting at his residence to explain where he had gone. I knew that much.