The thing about Zane was that he had always known.
He told me on the second day after the collar came off, in the small receiving room off the west corridor. I had worked there in the mornings because the acoustics were clean, and it was far enough from main traffic that conversations didn’t need managing.
Zane sat across from me. The static that used to crackle around him had dropped. What remained was sharper, quieter, more precisely himself.
“Vivian has been running a secondary operation out of the healing stores for fourteen months,” he said. His voice stayed flat, the way he delivered facts he had carried long enough, they no longer burned. “Not just the compound for the summit. The longer thing is data. Medical profiles. Ability assessments. Feral episode records. All indexe
