Kraken
Tia’s still at the table. She's watching the screens the way she watches everything, like she's looking for the thing that doesn't fit.
She's on her second cup of coffee. At some point she borrowed a pen from Mace's side of the table and started making notes on a fresh napkin, and Mace let her, which tells me something about how the room has shifted in the last two hours.
I don't look at her directly.
"Feed three," Ghost says.
I look at the screen. The west camera, the one that's been dropping on the eleven-minute interval. It holds. Normal. Grass, fence line, the dark tree line beyond.
Then it flickers.
Not thirty seconds. Two seconds. And when it comes back the shadows near the base of the fence have rearranged themselves in a way that shadows don't.
"That's not a test," Mace says.
"No." I'm already moving. "That's a breach."
The room snaps. Ghost is at the door before I finish the word. Mace closes his laptops with both hands in one motion. Two prospects materialize from the hallway. Weapons check, the fast practiced kind that happens in the hands before the brain catches up.
Tia pushes back from the table and stands. She's not panicking. Her face has gone still and focused in a way I haven't seen before, the same look she gets when she's reading the camera feeds, turned outward. "What do you need from me?"
It stops me for half a second. Not what's happening, not I'm scared. What do you need from me.
"Stay in this room," I tell her. "Lock the door behind us. Don't open it until I knock three times."
She nods once. No argument. No curtsy. Just: "Go."
We move fast through the compound. Night air hits humid and thick when we push through the west access door.
Floodlights cut harsh across grass and chain link.
The fence stands tall ahead with razor wire catching the light.
Ghost goes left. Mace right. I go straight toward the blind spot near post seven where the shadows moved wrong.
I find him twenty feet in. One of my prospects, down against the post. Blood dark on his shirt, breathing shallow. Not dead. Close enough.
"Get him to the infirmary," I snap at the two brothers behind me. They move.
I scan the tree line. Something shifts in the dark beyond the fence.
"Contact," Ghost calls low from the left flank.
The first shot comes from the trees. Then three more in quick succession, the crack of them flat and professional.
My men return fire. The night opens up with muzzle flashes and the smell of cordite and the specific chaos that sounds like violence and is, just violence, nothing more complicated than that.
I push forward along the fence line, low and fast. A figure breaks from the palms and runs.
I put two shots past him and he drops into a roll, comes up moving, gets ten more yards before Ghost takes him down from the side.
Another one retreats deeper into the trees.
I let him go. Retreating is information too.
It takes eleven minutes to secure the perimeter. I count them.
The same eleven minutes.
They weren't probing the fence. They were testing whether the interval change worked. Checking if we'd found them. Which means they know we were looking.
I get back to the operations room in time to hear Tia on the other side of the door before I knock. Not crying, not pacing. Talking. Low and steady. I can’t make out the words, but I know she’s safe.
I knock three times.
The lock disengages. The door opens. She takes one look at me, at my hands, my face, checking for damage the way you check for damage when you've been afraid for someone, and lets out a breath.
"You're okay."
"I'm okay."
She steps back to let me in. Her arms are wrapped around herself but she's steady. The napkin with her notes is folded in her hand. She held onto it the whole time.
I close the door behind me. The room feels smaller than it did before. Or maybe I'm just more aware of her in it, the vanilla smell of her cutting through the cordite still clinging to my jacket, the way she's looking at me like she's still doing the math on whether I'm actually fine.
"They weren't testing the fence," I say. "They were testing whether the rotation change worked. They came back at the same interval to see if we'd moved."
She processes that. "So they know your compound well enough to notice a twelve-minute difference in rotation timing."
"Yes."
"That's not cartel soldiers," she says. "That's someone who's been inside."
"Yeah.”
The word sits between us. She unfolds the napkin. Looks at it. Then holds it out to me, not handing it over, just showing me. She's added a new timestamp in the margin. Tonight's. And beside it, in her small neat handwriting: They came back to check. Someone told them to.
I look at it for a moment. Then I look at her.
She's been alone in a locked room for eleven minutes working the problem.
Mace opens the door and steps inside. Ghost returns with other patched members and we all get to work, watching the cameras. Tia takes her chair, the one near the console now, not the corner, and smooths the napkin on the table in front of her.
Mace glances at it. Glances at her. Looks at me.
I shake my head slightly.
The room settles into the particular quiet of people working a problem they don't have all the pieces to yet. Tia sits at the edge of it and doesn't say anything and watches the feeds.
An hour passes. The west perimeter holds. No more drops.
I'm at the console when I hear her chair scrape back. I turn. She's standing, arms still crossed, looking at feed three with her head tilted.
"The camera that dropped tonight," she says. "Is it the same one that dropped this afternoon?"
"Yes."
"And the one that dropped yesterday morning?"
Mace stops typing.
"Pull the maintenance logs on that specific unit," she says. "Not the dropout logs. The maintenance records. If someone's been physically accessing it to plant a timer device, there'll be a service entry that doesn't match your regular schedule."
The room is quiet.
Ghost pushes off the wall. "She's right."
Mace is already pulling the logs.
I look at Tia. She's watching the screen, not me. Her jaw is set. She found this thread and she's following it and she's not asking for credit or acknowledgment. She's just doing the work, the same way she does everything, because it needs doing.
Something shifts in my chest. Not attraction. Something quieter and more inconvenient than that.
Mace finds it in four minutes. A service entry three weeks ago. One of our own prospects signed off on it. A prospect named Finn.
The room goes cold.
I look at the name on the screen. Then at the date. Then at Tia, who’s gone very still because she can read a room even when she doesn't know all the players.
"That's your inside man," she says quietly.
"Yeah,” I say.
I pull out my phone. Text Ghost a single word. He reads it, nods once, and leaves the room.
The rest of the night goes fast and ugly in the way these nights always do. But before I pull Mace aside to start running Finn's full history, I stop at the table where Tia’s sitting. She looks up. Her eyes are tired but steady.
"Good work," I say.
It comes out simple. Direct. Like it costs me nothing, even though we both know better.
She doesn't smile or make a joke. She just says, "Don't let it happen again," meaning the dismissal, and looks back at the screens.
I almost smile. I turn away before she can see it.
"Tonight you stay in my room," I say, already heading for the door. "In my bed. I'm not leaving you in a room with one lock and a prospect who's been on a twelve-hour shift."
She doesn't argue. Behind me I hear the scrape of her chair. I look at her as she picks up her napkin and a random potted plant I didn’t notice before.
"Kraken," she says.
I stop.
"The prospect who signed that maintenance log. Is he going to be okay?"
I think about Finn. About what comes next for anyone whose name is on that log.
"No," I say. "He's not."
A beat.
"Okay," she says. Her voice is quiet and she doesn't ask anything else, and that, the way she absorbs it without flinching, without making me explain, is somehow the most unsettling thing she's done all day.
I wait for her in the hallway outside her bedroom door. She comes out a minute later with her napkin folded in her hand and her backpack tucked under her arm.
We walk to my room. The compound is quiet around us. The door closes. The lock clicks.
Tia November is doing something to my control. She sat in my operations room for three hours and made herself necessary.
That's going to be a problem.