Page 86

First, I needed to know everything Talia remembered. Every identifier. Every accession number. Every altered match.

Because if she was right—and three or four Ghost-format identifiers had appeared among reproductive records—then someone with access to the human compatibility program possessed information they should never have seen.

Information about the dead.

Information about us.

And if they knew which dead warriors were still alive, then the problem was no longer confined to one laboratory.

It had reached the Veil.

CHAPTER TEN

Talia

Ishould have been relieved. That was the part I kept coming back to.

Veyr had said he wasn’t taking me back. He had said he wouldn’t return me without my agreement. For the first time since Sera’n vanished, someone had told me I still had a say in what happened next.

So naturally, I trusted nothing.

The rented dwelling was quieter than the mountain safehouse and somehow more unsettling because of it.

Not silent. Quiet.

There was a difference.

Somebody in the neighboring unit was cooking something heavy with spice. The smell drifted faintly through the ventilation system, mixed with the cleaner the rental service had used on the floors. Transports passed outside often enough to cast moving bands of light across the front wall.

There were neighbors. Windows. A food unit that contained actual food instead of sealed survival packets. Two sleeping rooms. A small table that looked like somebody might sit at it because they wanted to eat rather than because they were plotting an escape route.

Normal things.

The cushions on the chairs were worn slightly flatter in the centers, and one corner of the table carried a pale heat mark from whoever had rented the place before us. Someone had lived here. Temporarily, probably, but still.

Which meant I had nothing obvious to blame for the knot in my stomach.

Veyr had been at the window for the past several minutes.

Not staring outside. Watching. I had spent enough time around him now to recognize the difference.

He stood slightly to one side of the glass instead of directly in front of it, giving himself a view of the street without turning himself into a silhouette. The window looked down onto a narrow pedestrian lane lined with stacked residences and small food stalls, their signs glowing against the early evening.

His weapon rested on the table within reach. Another sat beneath the back of his coat.

I knew that because I had watched him put it there.

He had checked the front door twice, the window once, and the rear exit three times. Then, while pretending to review something on the portable terminal, he had looked at all of them again.

He had not unpacked.

Neither had I, technically, but my bag was sitting beside one of the sleeping rooms because I expected to need clothes eventually. The sleeping space itself contained an actual mattress instead of a military bunk, a woven cover softer than anything at the mountain site, and a narrow shelf beside the bed with a charging point already built into it.

His equipment case remained closed by the door.

Ready to leave. Always ready to leave.

“You know staring at the street won’t make it confess anything.”