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“You said they pinged the house.”

“Yes.”

“Which means they knew where the house was.”

“Not necessarily.”

She frowned.

“A beacon query can be broad,” I said. “A system requests response from dormant infrastructure within a defined range. If the beacon answers, its location is exposed.”

“Did ours answer?”

“No.”

Some of the tension left her shoulders. “So whoever did it might not know we were actually there.”

“Correct.”

“But you still think we should leave.”

“Yes.”

Her relief vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “Because?”

“The beacon should not have been queried at all.”

She stared at me for a moment, then sat back.

That was enough explanation for her to understand the problem.

I opened the diagnostic log. No external response. No passive transmission.

Good.

I checked the source signature. Then checked it again.

Beside me, Talia said nothing. That was unusual enough to register. The request had been masked behind civilian infrastructure. Poorly, by the standards of the Veil. Well enough that ordinary security would never notice.

I stripped away the first routing layer, then the second. The underlying command architecture appeared.

My hands stopped.

“Veyr?”

I did not answer.

The signature was old. Not identical to current Veil architecture. But related. A legacy operational routing structure. One I had used before. Someone with access to an obsolete covert network had queried a dormant covert site shortly after I brought Talia there. That could mean they knew the site. It could mean they knew me. Neither possibility was acceptable.

“What did you find?” she asked.

“Nothing conclusive.”

She leaned back slowly. “That phrase means something very bad when you say it.”

“It means exactly what I said.”

“You found enough to make that face.”