“You think that was real?” he asks. “You think that actually meant something?”
“I think it was a mistake.”
“A coincidence.”
I give him a look.
“Seriously?” He runs a hand through his hair. “That’s what we’re going with?”
“What else do you want to call it?”
“It took them two years to even identify us as a potential cluster.” He’s leaning forward now, elbows on his knees. “Two years of us showing up in the same places, two years of whatever the hell this is, and they barely noticed. You really think one wrong entrance is going to set off alarms?”
I stop looking at the sky. Look at him instead.
“Yes.”
He blinks. “Yes?”
“Yes. I do.”
The silence stretches. Rane’s waiting for me to explain, and I don’t want to, because saying it out loud makes it real.
“They took two years to notice us,” I say, “because they didn’t want to. We were inconvenient. Complicated. Easier to file under ‘anomaly’ and wait for it to resolve itself.”
“So?”
“So they noticed him immediately.” I keep my voice even. “He walked through a door and they stopped mid-sentence to ask his name. That’s not protocol. That’s not procedure. That’s the system paying attention.”
Rane’s quiet for a long moment.
“You’re saying the timing matters.”
“I’m saying the timing is the only thing that matters.” I look back at the sky. “He didn’t just walk into the wrong room. He walked in at the exact moment she was being named as unmarked. That’s not coincidence. That’s overlap.”
“Overlap with what?”
“I don’t know yet.”
He doesn’t like that answer. I can feel him wanting to argue, wanting to find the hole in the logic, the reason this doesn’t mean what I think it means.
“Maybe it’s nothing,” he says finally. “Maybe he’s just some guy with a scheduling error.”
“Maybe.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“No.” I stand up, brushing off my pants. “I don’t.”
Dinner is quiet.
Nova comes to the table last. She’s been in her room since we got back—not hiding, exactly, but not present either. She looks tired in a way that hasnothing to do with sleep.
She sits between Rane and Beckett. Same as this morning, like it’s already become muscle memory.
I watch her look at the food.
It’s subtle. If I weren’t paying attention, I’d miss it. But I am paying attention, so I see everything.
