"You're okay."
"I'm okay."
She steps back to let me in. Her arms are wrapped around herself but she's steady. The napkin with her notes is folded in her hand. She held onto it the whole time.
I close the door behind me. The room feels smaller than it did before. Or maybe I'm just more aware of her in it, the vanilla smell of her cutting through the cordite still clinging to my jacket, the way she's looking at me like she's still doing the math on whether I'm actually fine.
"They weren't testing the fence," I say. "They were testing whether the rotation change worked. They came back at the same interval to see if we'd moved."
She processes that. "So they know your compound well enough to notice a twelve-minute difference in rotation timing."
"Yes."
"That's not cartel soldiers," she says. "That's someone who's been inside."
"Yeah.”
The word sits between us. She unfolds the napkin. Looks at it. Then holds it out to me, not handing it over, just showing me. She's added a new timestamp in the margin. Tonight's. And beside it, in her small neat handwriting:They came back to check. Someone told them to.
I look at it for a moment. Then I look at her.
She's been alone in a locked room for eleven minutes working the problem.
Mace opens the door and steps inside. Ghost returns with other patched members and we all get to work, watching the cameras. Tia takes her chair, the one near the console now, not the corner, and smooths the napkin on the table in front of her.
Mace glances at it. Glances at her. Looks at me.
I shake my head slightly.
The room settles into the particular quiet of people working a problem they don't have all the pieces to yet. Tia sits at the edge of it and doesn't say anything and watches the feeds.
An hour passes. The west perimeter holds. No more drops.
I'm at the console when I hear her chair scrape back. I turn. She's standing, arms still crossed, looking at feed three with her head tilted.
"The camera that dropped tonight," she says. "Is it the same one that dropped this afternoon?"
"Yes."
"And the one that dropped yesterday morning?"
Mace stops typing.
"Pull the maintenance logs on that specific unit," she says. "Not the dropout logs. The maintenance records. If someone's been physically accessing it to plant a timer device, there'll be a service entry that doesn't match your regular schedule."
The room is quiet.
Ghost pushes off the wall. "She's right."
Mace is already pulling the logs.
I look at Tia. She's watching the screen, not me. Her jaw is set. She found this thread and she's following it and she's not asking for credit or acknowledgment. She's just doing the work, the same way she does everything, because it needs doing.
Something shifts in my chest. Not attraction. Something quieter and more inconvenient than that.
Mace finds it in four minutes. A service entry three weeks ago. One of our own prospects signed off on it. A prospect named Finn.
The room goes cold.
