“A woman.” Grace doesn’t hesitate. “Always the same one. Calm. Not friendly—level. She never raised her voice. Not even when she was threatening my sister.” Her jaw tightens and lets go. “Somehow that made it worse.”
“Accent? Age?”
“No accent I could place. Not young. Not old.”
Mara leans closer to her camera. “When did she call?”
“Night. Always night, always late. Except once.” Grace’s eyes go somewhere else for a second. “One call in the middle of the day, near the end. She said we were changing how it worked. That was the meeting. That’s the day everything went wrong.”
“And the drops. What did you leave?”
“Small things. Pages I tore out of a diary. A report about an excursion that was already old news. I checked everything tomake sure it couldn’t hurt anyone.” She says it flat, no excuses. “It went behind the hardware store in town. She’d tell me when. I never saw who picked it up.”
“What did she ask you for?”
“Who was in the building. Whether people seemed worried. What the mood was like after a raid. Whether anyone new had come in.” Grace shrugs, one shoulder. “Small talk, almost. Gossip.”
Mara’s voice changes. Slower. “Did she ever ask you for routes? Schedules?”
“Yes.” She looks around. “I never gave them. Never. Not once.”
“But she pushed?”
“Yes.” She frowns as she says that, as if mulling it over. “But she couldn’t have pushed harder. It was only at the end that I felt real pressure. That was when she wanted me to meet her.”
The room is quiet. Mara sits back and goes still, and I’ve watched enough people find the thing they came for to know the look.
“That’s it,” she says. “They never pushed you for the good stuff, Grace, because they already had it. Someone was feeding them critical information the whole time you were feeding useless intel.” She lets that sit, then says it plainly. “They weren’t running you for information. They were keeping you on the hook. You were the one they’d blame when someone got close.”
Grace doesn’t move. Then her hands clench on the table as it sinks in. Months of it. Months of drops she stripped down to nothing, months of hating herself for every scrap…and it was never even about the scraps. I want to cross the room. The bear wants it worse. I put my shoulders harder into the wall.
“This is how they work.” Her eyes move, finding Jericho from her screen. “It’s how they set you up. Same playbook. The planted trail, the timing, everything too complete. Remember, Jericho?”
Jericho’s hands are flat on the table. He looks at them, not at anyone. “I know,” he says. “I remember.”
“So it’s the same person,” Nadia says. “Not a new leak. The same one. Inside since before Samien died.”
“Yup,” Mara says.
Nadia opens the laptop. “Then let’s see what we have. They were here before Samien. They have restricted-wing access—real access, not a badge story like the one they hung on Grace. They saw the bridge plan, or the paperwork around it. And they knew exactly where Grace slept, and how to access her cubicle. That narrows it down.”
“That’s still a list,” Viktor says.
“It’s shorter than it was yesterday.”
“It’s not short enough.” His voice doesn’t change, but the room hears the frustration in it anyway. “We watch. Nobody pulls records in a way that shows. Nobody changes their habits. This is a long game. It may not finish this fight now, or even this year. I’d rather take them late than tip them early and lose them for good.”
I’ve hunted things most of my life. You don’t walk toward this kind of animal. You wait downwind until it forgets you exist.
The problem is what we’re using for bait.
“The convoy net came off the Court’s lane maps,” Jericho says. “Faine’s people are still watching those roads. Crowe sends word when anything moves. If our leak burns another op out there, we’ll hear about it from their side before we hear it from ours.”
“Good,” Viktor says. “Keep that channel exactly as it is.”
Grace has been quiet through all of it. Now she leans forward.
“If this person’s working with the one who was handling me,” she says, “then they know about Serenity. They might know things about where she—”
