"Your father," Conner said, because sometimes there is no way to start a soft version of a hard conversation.
"Missing," Aftan said. He could have said gone and let the word be a door. He didn't. "Since I was small. I know his name and that he was Genshi and that he had friends who didn't all belong in the same rooms." He looked from Conner to Yuri. "And I know there are dragons because I heard one say something to me without opening its mouth."
Silence is a cloth. Sometimes it warms. Sometimes it smothers. This one did the former. Conner blinked once, carefully.
"What did it say?" Yuri asked.
"'Found you,'" Aftan said. The words felt both smaller and heavier when you took them out of your mouth and put them on a table.
Conner exhaled. It made him look briefly younger than he was. "Galen's last report said the white one—"
"White and black," Aftan said. "A pair."
Conner nodded as if that detail slotted into a place already waiting for it. "He said the white one looked at him like it knew him. Then the comm died."
Aftan's hands had flattened against his thighs. He made them into hands again. "I don't know why it would know me," he said. "I'm not—" Special, he almost said, and then remembered the beam and the device hum that turned to a path under his palms. "I'm not anyone yet."
"You're not no one," Yuri said. It sounded like simple fact rather than encouragement. "Tell me what you felt besides the word."
Aftan did. The weight. The paralysis that wasn't fear but made of the same thready muscle. The sense that space had been asked to move without taking him along. Yuri's eyes shuttered once, a processing blink. Conner listened like a man being given a map to a place he'd already been and hadn't understood at the time.
"You'll keep your command loop with Ahmar," Yuri said when Aftan finished. "You'll also feed me anything that tastes like this. Clean. No seasoning."
Aftan nodded. "Yes, sir." He hesitated. "And if I need to know something that Ahmar won't or can't tell me?"
"You ask him first," Yuri said. "He's your Captain. If he refuses, you ask him again when he's had coffee. If he refuses twice, you ask me and I'll make him tell you no with better words."
Conner's mouth twitched. "Sir."
Yuri ignored the mutiny of mirth in his soldier. "Conner will be your point of contact on residues and unofficial threads," he said to Aftan. "Conner, you will not pull him out of ops without talking to Ahmar, and you will not get him killed because you want an answer faster than the question can bear."
"Understood," Conner said. He offered Aftan a hand. "I'm sorry about the hallway."
"I'm not," Aftan said, and meant it.
They parted with a shared access key that unlocked a channel labeled with a word too boring to attract attention. Aftan stepped back into the corridor and breathed like the elevator had taught him. He didn't feel lighter. He felt… aligned. Like the plates under his feet had finally stopped sliding in opposite directions.
On his way to the midday brief, he ran into Albert outside the mess—Albert with his easy shoulders and the kind of smile that didn't ask you to be okay to deserve it.
"You look like you've been learning capital-T Truths," Albert said, handing him a protein bar he didn't remember asking for.
"Lowercase," Aftan said. "Plural."
Albert bumped his shoulder. "Good. Plurals can be argued with. How's Unit Three?"
"Alive," Aftan said, surprising himself with how much of an answer that was.
Albert's gaze flicked over his face the way a medic checks a wound for bleeding after the clot. "Kay being Kay?"
"She drifts when she pushes," Aftan said.
Albert snorted. "Don't we all." He dropped his voice. "Hey. Word is the Council's doing a deeper dive on the Needle tonight. Transports at twenty-hundred with a low profile that looks like a high profile so nobody looks twice. If you're not on it, don't be near it."
"I thought I wasn't supposed to know things like that," Aftan said.
"You're not," Albert said cheerfully. "That's why I didn't say it." He sobered a fraction. "Careful, Affy."
"I am," Aftan said.
"Be more than that," Albert said. "Be lucky." He squeezed Aftan's shoulder and moved on, trailing the kind of good that made rooms kinder for a while after he left them.
Evening lowered itself across HQ. The rains couldn't decide to commit. At nineteen-fifty, a convoy of unmarked vans idled in a service bay that had seen more secrets than it had confessed. Selene Hart walked among them in a trench coat meant to be boring. It was not. She spoke into a throat mic, one manicured nail tapping a clipboard that did not need tapping.
Aftan, standing with Unit Three at the lip of a shadow that pretended to be a wall, felt the old pre-mission coil. Ahmar was a shape at his right shoulder, the kind that made space feel intentional.
"Remember," Ahmar said quietly to his team. "We're ghosts unless we have to be flesh. We're ears unless we have to be hands."
Cap'n materialized on the far side of the bay with Unit One like the concept of readiness had decided to become people. He gave Aftan the smallest nod that still counted as one. Kay's gaze skated past Aftan and then returned for a second longer, acknowledgment of a rhythm found on a staircase earlier that day.
Conner and Yuri climbed into the last van. Conner's eyes found Aftan's and did the thing that meant not yet news; soon news. Aftan dipped a chin.
The convoy rolled, quiet as heavy things can be. Seattle at night watched them go the way a city watches anything it can't name: with curiosity first, then indifference, because there are always dishes to wash.
They staged three blocks from the Needle, in the skeleton of a storefront that would someday sell useful lies—artisan coffee, honest jeans. Selene's people hung "Under Renovation" banners with practiced speed. The force fields at the Needle's base shimmered faint red in the mist like a bruise catching light.
"Teams A and B, perimeter and civilian diversion," Selene said over the internal net, her voice clipped to coo. "Team C, interior residues. Team D, roof—carefully."
"That's us," Ahmar said. "Unit Three with Team C."
They moved in through a service duct that had been designed by someone with a sense of humor and a disregard for human shoulders. Forge muttered a prayer to small gods of geometry. Ren killed three cameras by yawning at them. Wisp's drone sniffed the air, then sneezed—an audio cue she'd programmed because it made Ren laugh and tension a little less of a tyrant.
The residue chamber did not look like anything. It looked like a maintenance closet with a stripe of paint that had been a slightly different white once. And yet, when Aftan stepped inside, the space adjusted to include him the way a room does when someone who belongs arrives.
He tasted metal and winter. His skin prickled in a pattern he was learning to read. He knelt, touched the air where a rectangle of hum had been in a simulation and found the shape of it here like a ghost had laid down and gotten up too fast.
"Here," he said.
Forge didn't ask where. He set the array where Aftan's hand hovered and powered it with a whisper. Glyphs rose like dew. Ren's screen bloomed with data points that wanted desperately to be a story.
"Clean," Ren said. "Too clean."
"Like lightning, not gasoline," Conner's voice came over the link from the next room. He sounded grimly pleased to hear his own earlier metaphor come back to him with more friends. "Log it. We cross-reference with the condo reflection at 03:12."
"Roof team," Cap'n's voice cut in. "Say again. What do you see?" A beat. "Copy. Pull back. Now."
Ahmar looked up. Aftan's spine went taut.
The roof team came down six minutes later with nothing to show and an air like a room that remembered forgetting. Outside, the city breathed. Inside, screens wrote numbers that looked science-shaped and felt useless.
"Enough," Yosua said over the command channel after an hour that had been ten minutes and a year. "Pack it. The public has been sufficiently reassured by the sight of vans."
Selene's voice smiled. "Copy, Grandmaster."
As they retraced their route, Aftan paused at the edge of the red shimmer. The white dragon's Found you slid across the back of his thoughts like a hand across a curtain. He glanced up, not expecting to see anything. The sky offered nothing but cloud.
"Compass," Wisp said softly behind him. "Don't go through doors you can't see."
"I won't," he said. "I'll just… remember where the hinges might be."
Wisp's hand bumped his shoulder. "Good boy," she said, without condescension. Then, lighter: "You owe me coffee for making me walk through a duct that smelled like sadness."
"I'll pay you in breakfast," he said.
She grinned. "Weaponized breakfast. My favorite."
They loaded into the vans. As they pulled away, a child in a window across the street lifted a crayon drawing and pressed it to the glass: a white curve, a black curve, two small ones beside them, and a stick figure with green dots for eyes. Aftan didn't see it. Conner did. He didn't say a word into any channel. He took a picture in his head and filed it under unsaid truths.