POV: Zane
He had the compound locked down in four minutes.
No one in. No one out. Every external communication channel closed except the three he personally controlled. Every operative accounted for and stationed. Every door between the inner compound and the outside world sealed with the secondary locks that even his senior people did not have codes for.
It was the fastest lockdown they had ever run. He knew because Mira timed them sometimes, the way she timed everything, and she told him the number with her eyebrows slightly raised when it was done.
He did not feel good about the speed. Moving fast meant something had already gone wrong.
He started with the cameras.
The compound had forty-one internal cameras running at all times, with recordings stored on a closed system that had no external connection. To get footage out, you had to physically be at a terminal and physically transfer it, which meant a person, which meant a trail.
He found the trail in eleven minutes.
Terminal four. South corridor. Used at six-fourteen this morning during a shift change when the corridor was empty for approximately eight minutes. Whoever had done it knew the shift schedule perfectly. Knew the blind spot in the camera coverage near terminal four. Knew the exact transfer method to avoid triggering the size-alert on the system.
This was not an amateur. This was someone who had been inside the compound's systems for a long time.
He pulled the full access log for terminal four going back six months.
What he found made him go very still.
It was not one breach. It was not even a recent pattern. The terminal had been accessed in small, careful increments going back eight months tiny data pulls, nothing large enough to trigger alerts, each one separated by enough time to look like normal system noise. Location data. Movement patterns. Staffing rotations.
Feeding out. Slowly and carefully. For months.
He cross-referenced the data types. Location data meant compound coordinates not precise, but directional. Enough to triangulate over time. Enough to eventually find them.
He pulled the timeline.
The feeding started eight months ago.
Nova had arrived four days ago.
But there was a cluster a denser, more focused set of pulls starting exactly six months before her arrival. He checked the date. Ran it against Nova's file, the little of it that was not sealed.
Six months before her eighteenth birthday.
He sat with that for a long time.
Someone had not been watching for him. The compound location, his movements, his team that was incidental. Background data. The focused surveillance had started when Nova turned eighteen minus six months, which meant someone had known her birthday was coming and had started preparing.
They had been watching for her.
A twenty-year-old Powerless girl from Slum District Seven with sealed government records.
He closed the terminal and went to find Mira.
She was already in the operations room with three screens running. She looked up when he came in and he told her what he had found and watched her face do the same thing his had done that moment of stillness when something stops being a security problem and becomes something larger and stranger.
"It is not about you," she said.
"No."
"It has never been about you." She looked at the screens. "She lands in that building tonight and someone activates a more urgent protocol. Because her being inside a hostile operation was not in the plan. They needed her somewhere they could watch her and the holding room was not it."
"Which means whoever is running this wanted her here," Zane said. "Or wanted her found."
"Or wanted her found by you specifically." Mira looked at him. "Your brother knows you. He knows what you do and why you do it. He knows you run those networks and raid those operations. He knows what you would do if you found a girl running barefoot through gunfire."
Zane did not answer.
He went to find Nova.
She was not in her room. Not in the common area. Not with Sera or Reo. He checked the roof access last because it was the least obvious option and found the hatch propped open with a small piece of equipment that someone had wedged in the mechanism not forcing it, just keeping it from locking behind them.
He went up.
She was sitting at the roof's edge with her legs crossed and her back straight, looking out at the city. The Dead Zone spread below them, dark and industrial, and beyond it the lit towers of the upper districts glowed against the night sky like they were a different world. Which they were.
She heard him come up but did not turn around. Did not tell him to leave either.
He sat down next to her. Not close. His usual distance.
The city hummed below them. Somewhere far off a siren ran and faded. The night was cool and the roof was quiet in the specific way that high places were quiet removed from things without being away from them.
He did not know how long they sat there. Long enough that the tension in her shoulders shifted slightly. Not gone. Just different.
"You are trying to figure out why my records are sealed," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"So am I." She was still looking at the city. "I have been since Mira told me they were. I keep going back to the same question who seals the records of a Powerless girl born in the slums? What would be the reason? What could I possibly have that someone powerful enough to seal government records would want to hide?"
"I do not know yet," he said. Which was true. He had pieces. Not a picture.
"But you have something," she said.
He looked at her profile. "The surveillance started six months before your birthday," he said. "Specifically your eighteenth birthday. Someone has been watching for you for at least that long. Probably longer." He paused. "This was planned around you. Not around me."
She was quiet for a moment.
"That should scare me more than it does," she said.
"What does it do instead?"
She turned and looked at him for the first time since he had sat down. In the dark her eyes were very steady. "Makes me want answers more than I want safety," she said. "Which is probably a problem."
"Probably," he agreed.
His comm unit vibrated.
He looked down at it. One message from his deepest system contact the one he used only for things that could not go through any other channel. The contact who had spent three weeks getting inside Calder's sealed record system.
One line.
Seal order: Calder Voss. Signed date: the week she was born.
He read it twice.
Then he looked up at Nova.
She was watching his face with those sharp careful eyes, reading it the way she read everything looking for the useful details.
"What," she said. Not a question. A demand.
He turned the comm unit so she could see the screen.
She read it.
The city glowed below them.
Neither of them said anything.
Because some things, when they finally land, are too large for words.
At least for the first few seconds.