The last active Korthane smuggling ring in the Sovereign Imperium had twelve members.
Sera Myrvalis knew all of their names, their cover identities, their dead-drop locations, and the fact that three of them had been born in the Imperium itself and were operating as deep-cover assets who genuinely believed they were loyal Imperial citizens doing minor, profitable black-market work. They did not know they were passing encoded cargo manifests to a Korthane collection node in the Westmark trading district.
She let them operate for eight months after she had identified them.
This was not oversight. It was methodology. The ring was the cleanest window into the Arbiter's pre-Vigil intelligence collection she was likely to get, and she read every communique that passed through it — both the manifests they knew they were carrying and the invisible secondary channels embedded in the binding thread patterns of the cargo sacks.
