The memory loosens its grip. Clean air fills my lungs. The workstation glows in front of me. Percy hums softly beside my hand. Piece by piece, the room comes back into focus, familiar enough that I can anchor myself in it.
“I understand why the redactions are there.” I gesture at the data. “I’m just telling you they’re hiding the same thing your mole is hiding.”
I zoom in on the routing data. “Somebody’s moving through the spaces between your cells. That’s where the traffic is. That’s where the signature is.” I glance at him. “If I can’t see who’s supposed to be there, I can’t tell who’s not.”
Zavin doesn’t answer right away. The heat-sensing pits along his jaw are angled toward me, and I know he’s reading things I can’t hide. A spike in my pulse. The frustration warming my skin. Every physical reaction my body insists on broadcasting.
His expression doesn’t change. His eyes give away even less. Sitting across from him feels like playing cards with someone who can see my hand while keeping his own hidden under the table.
“You’re a contractor who’s been inside my network for less than forty-eight hours.” The tone stays calm, but the decision is already made. “Operative identities remain classified. Work with what you have.”
I stare at him. “I’m working with an incomplete data set.”
“Then work around it.”
I hold his gaze for a few seconds, looking for any sign that pushing harder will accomplish something.
The easy charm from last night is gone. No amused half-smile. No warmth. No casual conversation in the corridor. This is the man who runs an intelligence network spread across half a planet, and that version of him isn’t interested in negotiating.
I pull the redacted logs into Percy’s analysis framework and start building a pattern-isolation algorithm around the missing data.
“I’ll work with what you’ve given me. When the redactions become a problem, you’ll hear about it.”
“I’d expect nothing less.” I pretend not to hear the amusement in his voice and keep working.
His tone is still easy, but not in quite the same way as before. The attention he turns on me feels more focused somehow. More personal. I can’t point to anything specific. Not a word. Not an expression. If someone asked me what changed, I wouldn’t have an answer.
The feeling is familiar. It lands like a pattern anomaly does when I’m working. Nothing concrete. Nothing I can prove. Just the sense that something no longer fits where it should.
“Show me what you’ve found so far.” The warmth is still there when he says it. In his voice. In the way he leans toward the workstation. Like my analysis is suddenly the most interesting thing in the room.
Maybe it’s deliberate. Maybe it isn’t. Either way, I’m not interested in pulling on that thread.
I rotate Percy’s projection so he can see the full network render. Amber annotations glow across the blue framework of his architecture.
“The substrate vulnerability runs through every junction in the network. We confirmed that when we inspected the hardware yesterday.” I enlarge the eastern cluster and highlight the affected nodes. “What I’ve been working on this morning is the traffic analysis.”
The anomaly spreads across the screen.
“These junctions are carrying more traffic than they should. The increase doesn’t match anything happening in the cells above them. If your mole is using the substrate to move between cells, they’re coming through one of these nodes. The excess traffic is the only trace they’re leaving behind.”
He’s quiet beside me while I walk him through it. Without thinking, I start simplifying the explanation. Breaking it down the way I would for a client who understands the outcome but not the mechanics.
Then I stop. His attention isn’t wandering. He’s following the data. Not politely. Actually following it. His gaze moves along the route I’ve highlighted, tracking the same trail.
“The excess traffic narrows to three junction points in the eastern cluster.” Zavin’s finger traces the path across the render. “If the mole is entering through one of these nodes, the access window is limited by the processing cycle. You’re looking for traffic appearing during the handoff gaps.”
I blink. Because that’s exactly where I was going next.
He isn’t a systems analyst. He doesn’t spend his days buried in code and network architecture. Yet somehow he’d looked at the same pattern I was looking at and jumped straight to the right conclusion.
The scales and the amber eyes are one thing. I’ve already filed those under problems I have no intention of engaging with. The trouble is that every time I think I’ve worked him out, he does something unexpected.
He’s approaching the problem from an entirely different direction and still arriving at the same conclusions I am. Not because he understands the technology, but because he understands patterns. The logic underneath them. The shape they make when you step back far enough to see the whole picture.
“That’s correct.” My voice sounds steadier than I feel. “The handoff gaps are where the monitoring drops below threshold. If I can isolate traffic that only appears during those windows, I can separate the mole’s activity from the legitimate movements moving through the same junctions.”
My explanation trails off as he picks up the thread.
