Acceptance.
“Don’t do it again without telling me.” She reaches for the nearest food container and opens it. “What is this?”
“Protein. I don’t know what humans prefer.”
She examines the contents and selects a piece. I wait for a verdict I shouldn’t be invested in.
She takes another bite. Why can’t I stop watching her mouth close around the morsel I brought her? “I haven’t had real protein in weeks.”
Just as I thought. The admission is small and unguarded, and it slips past her defenses in a way I suspect she wouldn’t have permitted if she weren’t hungry. She was dying where she lived. Not the dramatic version. The slow erosion of a body running out of resources. If she’d died, her body would have been thrown into the depths of the Splits and another being would have been in her lodgings within minutes.
I push the thought aside. She’s here now. She’s fed and breathing filtered air and her lungs won’t deteriorate further. I’m protecting the House’s investment. That’s all.
“What are you doing?”
No glance up from the display. “My job.” Her fingers trace a pathway across Percy’s holographic render, and the amber annotations she’s layered over my network’s blue architecture glow between us. “You might have locked me in here, but you didn’t tell me not to start.”
I pull a chair beside her workstation and sit, taking in the detailed construction on her display, amazed and horrified that she’s gotten so far in a short time.
“Your security looks solid on the surface,” she says, tapping a section of the display. “Every part of your network is walled off from the others, separate passwords, separate access. Textbook intelligence structure.” She expands a subsection, rotating it so I can see the connections she’s traced. “But underneath all of that, there’s a shared foundation layer. Think of it as the plumbing running beneath separate rooms. The original designers probably never realized they’d built a hallway connecting every room in the house. Someone who finds that hallway could move anywhere in the network without opening a single locked door.”
I purse my lips. “You found that? In an hour?”
The eye-roll she barely holds in tells me exactly what she thinks of the question. “I found that in the first twenty minutes. The rest of the time I’ve been mapping how far the hallway reaches.” A secondary display opens, and she stabs a finger at the screen. “It’s everywhere, in case you’re interested. Every walled-off section of your network sits on top of the same shared foundation. There isn’t a single room in this house that hallway doesn’t touch.”
Every wall I’d built to keep my operatives safe has been sitting on top of a hallway I didn’t know existed, and it’s been there since the day the original designers laid the foundations. Could this be how I’m being attacked?
“And my current monitoring system doesn’t flag movement?”
She rotates the display, tracing a pathway through the amber web. “You’d have no idea anyone had been inside. From the surface, every section looks sealed.”
The breach would be invisible. The word drops through me with the weight of everything Resh laid out in the operations room.
“Could you tell if someone has already walked through it?”
She’s reading the shift in my tone, the moment this stopped being a theoretical conversation. “Someone covering their tracks would have tried to sweep up behind them, but digital movement is never perfectly clean. Go deep enough and the evidence is always there.”
Her gaze sharpens. “You’re not asking me about a design flaw. You’re telling me someone is already inside your network.”
She’s close now, close enough that the clean scent of her skin cuts through the ambient pheromone blend. Close enough that I count the individual lashes framing those dark eyes.
The intelligence operative in me says give her nothing beyond what’s operationally necessary. My gut says she’s my only option.
Give her everything and she finds the mole faster. I’m certain of that.
Give her everything and she finds Selin too.
Not the name. Not immediately. The trail. The missing pieces. The records that don’t quite line up. And once she starts pulling on that thread, she follows it all the way to the end. To a dead operative buried beneath months of scrubbed data. To the reality of what happens inside House Sethrak when someone learns the wrong thing.
No.
She doesn’t need that.
I give her the architecture instead. The traffic patterns. The routes moving beneath the network. Enough to find the breach. Enough to trace the intrusion. The method, not the casualties. Let her hunt the door without seeing what’s waiting on the other side of it.
It’s a sensible boundary.
The problem is Miro.
