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More archived military specimens.

More reproductive accession numbers that did not match the original identities.

My pulse picked up. “It wasn’t just you.”

“No,” Anik said. “The same transfer structure appears in several of the records you recovered.”

Veyr’s face hardened. “Purpose?”

“Still unconfirmed.”

An answer without pretending we had all of them.

Anik continued. “What we can establish is that the samples were not selected randomly. The warriors involved cluster around particular military lineages and records tied to politically significant families.”

I thought about the compatibility changes. The reassigned women. The sample transfers. The royal credential buried in the archive.

“So someone was testing those bloodlines against human compatibility.”

“At minimum,” Anik said. “Possibly steering outcomes as well. We do not yet have enough evidence to distinguish between the two.”

Veyr stared at his identifier.

“Dead warriors.”

I understood what he meant.

“Dead men don’t check their reproductive files.”

His eyes shifted to mine.

“And Ghosts are even less likely to know those files exist.”

The room went quiet. Not because the mystery was solved. It wasn’t.

We still did not know who had built the system, what outcome they ultimately wanted, or how far the manipulation extended.

But for the first time, I understood why Veyr had been there.

Someone had taken biological material belonging to a man who was officially dead and used it in a reproductive system he had never entered, without his knowledge or consent.

The parallel hit harder than I expected.

I had been assigned by numbers.

Veyr had been used by them.

Different sides of the same machine.

Anik closed the transfer record. “We are continuing to trace every specimen routed through the same authorization structure.”

“How many?”

“Too early to give you a reliable number.”

I nodded.

That answer I could live with.