The Leak
1341 Words
Lyra's Pov
The only way to find a spy is to tell everyone a different lie and see which one travels.
The morning after the discovery, Theron and I worked through the problem systematically in his office. Six people had been in that room when we made the plan. Theron, me, Damon, Sera and two Council guards who had been posted just inside the door the entire time, present for every word. We started by eliminating who it could not be.
Sera was off the list immediately. She had given us the names. She had no reason to build a trap and then warn the people inside it. That made no sense.
Theron and I eliminated each other without discussion. The bond between us made that simple. I would have felt it if he was hiding something that large. He would have felt it from me. We moved on.
Damon was harder. Forty years of loyalty was not nothing. Theron had known him since childhood. But loyalty was not unbreakable, and the right kind of pressure applied over enough time could bend almost anyone. We did not remove his name. We kept it and kept moving.
The two guards were named Finn and Cora. Both had been vetted personally by Damon before being assigned to Council-level security. Clean records, no known outside contacts, no financial irregularities. But vetting only showed what someone had done, not what they might do under the right circumstances.
The new plan was simple. Each of the six would be told a slightly different version of the next move. Whoever the leak was would pass their version to the network. When the network reacted, the reaction would reveal which version they received.
My Oracle gift helped design each false version to be specific enough to trace. But while I was doing that something else came through, a feeling more than a vision. Something about the premise was wrong. I could not see it clearly enough yet to say it out loud. Not until I was sure.
We executed the plan over the next twenty-four hours. Each person received their version through normal conversation, nothing that felt like a test or a briefing. Just information dropped naturally into an ordinary exchange. Damon was told the attack on the network would be coming from the south, that we were moving teams in that direction within forty-eight hours. Finn was told the priority target was the network's financial records, that we had found a way to access them and planned to move on that first. Cora was told something more specific: that my Oracle gift had located the Architect's identity, that I knew who it was and would be presenting the information to Theron by the end of the day.
We watched and waited for the network's reaction.
I spent the day in Sera's room, asking careful questions about the nine years. I was not interrogating her. I was listening, letting her talk when she wanted to.
At one point she mentioned a man who used to bring food to where they kept her every morning. "He always knew things," she said. "Not like he was listening at the doors. He knew things before they happened. The people who kept me used to say he had eyes everywhere inside the household." She paused. "They called him the household. Not a name. Just that. Like it was a title."
"What did he look like?"
Sera shook her head slowly. "I never saw his face clearly. He always kept his back turned when he came in."
I noted it and moved on and did not let her see that it had landed somewhere important.
The network reaction came before evening. The movement confirmed they had received Cora's version. They knew about the Oracle identification story. They were reacting to the idea that I had located the Architect.
Except Cora had not gone anywhere.
She had been under direct visual surveillance from the moment the testing began. Two of Damon's most trusted people had been on her the entire time. She had made no calls, sent nothing, spoken only to approved personnel inside the compound. She had not passed anything to anyone. There was no window in which she could have.
My unease from the previous day crystallized. The leak was not one of the six people in the room. The room itself was the problem.
We requested a full architectural review of the meeting room. Hidden panels, listening infrastructure. Within two hours we found it: A device behind the wall, small, old, sophisticated. It captured audio and transmitted it passively, no active signal to detect unless you were specifically scanning for it. Whoever planted it never needed to be in the room. They could have been anywhere in the compound, or nowhere near it at all, and they would have heard every word spoken in that room for however long the device had been active.
We traced the installation. The records showed it had been placed eleven years ago during a renovation of that section of the building. Eleven years. Before I arrived, before the contract, before any of this. We pulled the estate records from that period and went through them carefully, looking for who had access to that specific wall during the construction window.
One name came up consistently. Margaret. Head of household staff. She had supervised that renovation personally, signed off on every stage of it, and had unrestricted access to that section of the building throughout the entire process.
Margaret was brought in quietly. No alarm, no scene. She looked at me when she entered the room and something in her face settled. Like she had been waiting for this.
Theron’s voice was low. "How long?"
Margaret did not deny it. "Since before you were Alpha. Since your father was. I was placed inside this household when you were seventeen. Before the coup. They wanted someone inside, someone with access to everything."
Theron absorbed that without any visible reaction.
Margaret continued before he could speak again. "I drew lines. There is information I withheld. Things I did not pass along because I knew what would happen if I did. I want you to know that."
"That is the same thing." Theron said.
Margaret did not argue. She knew exactly what he meant. Drawing private lines while serving the people who wanted him dead was not a moral defence. It was just a slightly different kind of betrayal. She gave us everything she knew about her handler and the structure above her before anyone asked her to. Names, contact methods, the pattern of how information moved up the chain.
Margaret's information confirmed the network structure but added one devastating detail. The network's plan was never only about eliminating me. Theron was also on the termination list. The goal was to kill both of us and install a puppet Alpha from a bloodline the network controlled. The Northern Territory was the prize, not just the Oracle.
Then, just before Damon's people moved to take her out of the room, she stopped.
"There is one more thing," she said. "They have a secondary list. Contingency targets. For after."
I looked at her. "Who?"
Margaret's eyes moved to my stomach briefly, then back up. "Anyone who carries Oracle-Alpha blood in the future."
Margaret looked at my stomach when she said it, and I felt something cold move through me that had nothing to do with the temperature in the room. They were not just planning to kill us. They were planning to ensure that nothing we might create together would ever survive long enough to matter.
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