The silence stretches and I leave it alone. Kazren is patient when he wants something. Painfully patient. He can stand in silence for an hour if he thinks the other male will eventually fill it. I learned that lesson young.
“Father lost one human already.”
The words slide between my ribs. For a second I forget the corridor, forget Kazren, forget the years in between. One cycle she was there. The next she was gone — no argument, no warning, no punishment. Father removed her from the records, disconnected every channel I could have used to find her, and carried on with his day. An inefficiency corrected. A lesson delivered.
I force the memory down. My scent stays flat, the heat buried, claws sheathed. Across from me Kazren waits not for an answer, but for a reaction. A flinch. A change in scent. Anything. The disciplinerequired to deny him isn’t difficult; Father spent years beating it into both of us, and Kazren knows exactly how hard it is because he learned it beside me.
“It’s remarkable how often history repeats itself,” he says when the silence has run long. “Humans never seem to last around this family. Father does hate waste. I’d think you’d have learned to stop hiding them by now.”
He steps around me at last. His shoulder misses mine by a fraction. “Sleep, little brother. You look like you need it.”
The formal black of his jacket disappears gradually up the hall, swallowed by distance and shadow. He never looks back. I stay where I am and run through every word again. He reached back eight years for that one sentence.
To her.
The human female Father sold off-world before dawn could reach the upper levels. One cycle she existed. The next she was gone, carried away on a ship I spent months trying to find and years failing to forget. Kazren knows the story. Everyone in the family knows the story. Bringing her up now should mean nothing. The problem is that Kazren rarely does anything that should mean nothing.
I close my eyes briefly and replay the conversation. The contractor audit. The designation review. The comment about records. The reminder about Father. Every piece fits too neatly beside the next. Was he probing, or confirming something he already suspects? That’s the question that refuses to leave me alone.
Kazren only asks questions he’s already started answering for himself. Most of the time he’s not interested in the information — he’s interested in the reaction. He throws a hook into the water and watches the surface.
Two cycles ago he stood at the contract boards while I walked Miro through the corridor. I hoped he hadn’t seen her but I know better than to wish for that. We were both raised to see everything.
Miro is safe as long as she’s a face without a name or a name without a face. The designation review gives Kazren access to one. The contract boards may have given him the other. I can’t tell whether he’s already connected them or whether he’s still deciding if there’s a connection worth making.
Every hour she remains inside House Sethrak is another hour for curiosity to become investigation, another hour closer to a name disappearing from the records and a comm channel that never answers again. If he doesn’t know, then I’m creating the very pattern he’ll follow.
Getting her off Vahiri is still the clean answer. It’s the answer I’d give anyone else. The things that survive on this planet stay small, stay forgettable, and leave before anyone important notices they exist. Every instinct I have says the same thing. Find the mole. End the threat. Put Miro on the first ship leaving orbit and make sure I never learn where it lands.
The thought should sit comfortably. Instead it leaves a hollow place behind it.
I push that aside and start walking. The lower levels wait beneath me, along with the work that actually matters. The investigation. The mole. Problems I know how to solve. But the unease follows me down the passage, because if Kazren has already started looking, disappearing may no longer be an option Miro gets to choose.
Chapter Ten
MIRO
The full access logs are a gift and a headache in equal measure. Percy and I have been working through them for hours, and the picture isn’t pretty. Every trail I follow ends the same way. Clean on the surface. Altered underneath. Records changed after the fact, authorizations scrubbed, timestamps that don’t line up with the surrounding data. Someone keeps cleaning up after themselves, and they’re good at it.
I’ve been tracking every altered record, every scrubbed authorization, every misaligned timestamp, and the list is longer than I’d like. The good news, if there is any, is that it narrows the field. The bad news is who’s left.
The problem is the live system is only half the picture. The junction node writes to local hardware first and the live network second. Whoever has been cleaning the trails can reach the live system from anywhere. They can’t reach the buffer logs without standing in front of the hardware.
Neither can I. Which means the one copy of the data they can’t scrub is sitting two levels down, and I’ve spent hours staring at an incomplete picture while trying to come up with a reason not to go get it.
The lock on my door runs on Sethrak proprietary firmware. Percy cracks it embarrassingly fast, which says something deeply unflattering about a criminal empire of this scale.
I tell him to hold it open on a passive loop, locked on the external sensor and open on mine, then slip into the passage before I can think too hard about whether this is a good idea.
I’m not supposed to leave my quarters. Zavin was abundantly clear. If he discovers I’ve wandered off into the lower levels on my own, I’m fairly certain I’ll never hear the end of it.
Fortunately, discovering it requires catching me.
The buffer logs I need aren’t available remotely, and every hour I spend waiting is another hour for someone to notice the bait has been touched. If I’m fast enough, I’ll be back in my room before Zavin finishes whatever meeting dragged him away this morning.
The passage is colder than the residential tier. The polished wall panels disappear after the first turn, replaced by bare stone and exposed utility conduits. The air smells of coolant and damp rock. No decorative lighting. No attempt to make any of this pleasant. Just functional grey fixtures and the quiet hum of infrastructure nobody is meant to notice.
I’m halfway to the junction node when Lord Sethrak turns the corner.
