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We were not investigators. We were weapons.

The realization landed harder than I expected.

Talia watched me.

“You weren’t supposed to look this closely.”

“No.”

“You were supposed to trust it.”

“Yes.”

Her gaze sharpened. “And kill me if necessary.”

I said nothing.

Could not.

“Veyr.”

“Yes.”

The word came out harder than I intended.

She flinched slightly.

I regretted it immediately. Not because the answer was wrong. Because I had made the truth sound like it belonged to her.

“It was not about you.”

“That doesn’t make it better.”

“I know.”

She looked away.

I closed the file. For several seconds, the terminal sat dark. I could have left it there. I had already found enough to prove the mission was fabricated. Instead, I reopened it.

“What are you looking for now?” she asked.

“The original source.”

“You said there wasn’t a name.”

“There is always a source.”

Nothing appeared from nowhere. Orders moved through systems. Systems left residue.

I stripped away visible routing markers and followed the internal architecture as far as the offline copy allowed. Most branches terminated exactly where they should have. Then I found a checksum inconsistency buried in a transport log.

Small. Almost irrelevant. The kind of error a Ghost would ignore under deadline.

I followed it.

A routing bridge surfaced beneath the packet architecture. Legacy Veil structure. The same family as the query that had touched the mountain safehouse.

My hands stopped.