“Second airframe,” Ty said.“Smaller.Higher pitch.”
“Yep, good call,” Dale found it and let out a slow breath.“Same hand?”
“Feels like it,” Ty said.“Same turns.Same hover time.He’s practiced.”
Dale nodded once.“Yep, right again.So—unknown operator.Consumer gear.Careful.Looking at our fence, not the view.”He dragged his finger and dropped a second track over the first.
“Why the two drones?”Ty asked.
Dale sighed.“Could be using a different camera, infra red, night vision, who knows.”
The second drone slid low over the outer fence and disappeared into the soft corner between cameras.
“Make a note: south run,” Dale said.“Tomorrow, we walk it and put eyes on everything.”
He watched as Ty thumbed it in.“Noted.”
Ty stayed quiet a moment, then said, “You notice anything about Oren tonight?”
“Yeah,” Dale said.He kept the glass moving across the tree line.“Something was off as soon as he got home.”
“He said he was fine,” Ty said.“He wasn’t.And it was certainly not like him to bow out of this.”Ty gestured around at the gear around them.“He loves this tech shit.”
“He was at the new wing tonight as always,” Dale said.“Checking spans.”He pictured Oren bent over Ty’s drawings, neat lines and careful numbers, the way Oren’s hands went still when his head got loud.“Think something happened?”
“I think he’ll tell us when he processes it all, that’s his MO,” Ty said.“If it had been something big he would have said something straight away.I think it might just be the voices in his head getting loud again.”
“I hear that.”Dale lifted the radio, thought better of putting Oren’s name on the air, and set it back down.“Fence first.”
Two more passes, five minutes apart.Dale marked each one.The arcs matched—loiter over the service road, drift to the blind spot, climb out to the west.A man could build a schedule from that kind of attention.
“Whoever’s flying has hours,” Ty said, lower now.“Real hours, not hobby hours.”
“Okay,” Dale said.“Unknown pilot, mapping behavior.We keep our heads down and gather intel.We don’t tip our hand until we’re ready.”He tapped the tablet once more and saved the overlay.“If it repeats tomorrow, we’ll be able to guess his next turn.”
He wanted to drop the bird, hard and clean, just to let the night know who owned the ridge.He wanted to go find Oren and make him sit and explain why his eyes hadn’t settled that night.He did neither.He stayed on the line of departure—didn’t step off—because someone had to.
Bateman’s voice came clean and clipped through their comms.“Roof, copy?”
“Go,” Dale said.
“Conference room.All leads.Now.”
“On our way.”Dale capped the binoculars and slung them.“Log what we’ve got,” he told Ty.“We’ll brief downstairs.”
Dale closed the tablet.Ty looked past him into the dark.“You think this is about the drones?”
“Probably,” Dale said.He took one last look at the trees and the space above them—nothing moving but night.“Either way, we go.”
They climbed down off the roof.Dale matched his pace to Ty’s in the hall, already stacking the conversation he didn’t want to have with Oren against the one he had to have with the team.First the conference room.Then the fence.Then Oren.One thing at a time.
He could live with that order for the next ten minutes.
****
The conference roomwas pretty quiet when he and Dale walked in.Ty took the end of the table because it let him see everyone at once—Bateman at the head, arms crossed over his chest, Marsh to his left, phone face-down for once, Ricky and Ezra across from the bank of windows, Oren two seats down from Ty, jaw set, Dale beside him, steady like a wall.The screen on the far end hummed alive with Dev’s face, lit by his own monitor.Hogan wasn’t in the room, but he figured the man was probably on watch or something.
Ty tried to put his attention where it belonged—on the briefing that was about to take place—but his gaze kept sliding back to Oren.Same shirt from an hour ago, same clean lines, but something in the posture off by degrees.Color high in his cheeks, the look he wore when he was holding something in.Dale had seen it, too.Ty could feel the heat of his focus from the next chair like a second pulse.
