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“Military personnel whose identities are removed from ordinary systems.”

“Dead but classified?”

“Sometimes.”

I stared at him. “Sometimes?”

His eyes stayed on the mark. “Sometimes the record is more useful than the truth.”

“That is an extremely disturbing sentence.”

“Yes.”

“At least you know.”

I looked back at the screen. “Why would reproductive records include administratively dead warriors?”

“They should not.”

“Maybe they were tested before they died.”

“They would remain in historical records.”

“This wasn’t historical?”

“No.”

That got my attention. “You can tell that from the mark?”

“Yes.”

I looked at the screen again.

The room suddenly felt even more artificial. Air circulated. Lights hummed. Water waited in a dispenser.

A dead man’s records glowed beneath my hand while the very alive man sat across from me.

“Then this is current.”

His silence answered.

I sat back. “That’s bad.”

“Yes.”

“Finally, a straightforward answer.”

He ignored me.

I added another identifier and stopped. Something scratched at the edge of my memory. A number. Not a number. A sequence.

I closed my eyes. Sera’n’s screen. His manual column. One line near the bottom. Dark text. Sealed designation. Compatibility field.

I opened my eyes. “There was one with no percentage.”

Veyr looked at me. “What?”

“One of the sealed ones. Most had compatibility values beside them. This one didn’t.”