Lena's POV
Rourke had, for the past three months, been watching a specific council member with the particular focused attention of a man who has identified a thread he cannot yet pull without the risk of unraveling something larger.
He told me this standing in the cleared council room, in the quiet that follows a concluded session, with the deliberate care of someone who had been carrying information alone for long enough that the carrying had become its own kind of weight.
"I identified irregular patterns in the intelligence reports approximately four months ago," he said. "Small things, individually. A delay in a communication that should have been immediate. A document forwarded with a minor alteration that could have been transcription error and was not. The kinds of things that onl
