Page 121 of Fractured Loyalties
I scan further. On reentry, Mara went quiet. No system calls. No audio memos. She moved from the kitchen to the basement to her assigned quarters. No pacing. No loops. But she didn’t stay too long in her bedroom.
She went to mine.
And she stayed there.
I breathe in slowly.
Then run a sweep on the house perimeter.
There it is. Northwest outer mesh pinged just after Lydia left. Subtle. Featherweight. Deliberate. Whoever it was knew what not to trigger. They brushed the warning net without stepping into it.
That takes skill.
Or familiarity.
Inbound telemetry reads a secondary ghost ping a few minutes later. Bounced through Budapest, chained throughLyon, then off an outdated biomedical relay. Whoever it was, they didn’t just want to be seen. They wanted to be read.
Like a signature scrawled on the edge of a mirror.
I tap into the signal archive. The compression is dirty. Stuttered. Hand-built.
ALTA tech.
Old ghosts.
I walk to the sub-level cabinet and key in a manual lock sequence. It hisses open.
Inside is a long black box. Dustless. Marked with four letters I told myself I wouldn’t say out loud again.
ALTA.
I lift it free and set it on the workbench. The latch resists at first. Then it gives.
Inside: a modified signal decoder, built from pre-war telecom scrap and illegal firmware injections. I built it when I was still a syndicate. When I thought ghosts could be tracked by noise alone.
I lift it free, run a wire to the house mainframe, and sync the first sweep.
Nothing.
Second sweep: a low-pulse static echo matching the burner bounce. Signature partially scrubbed, but not completely. This wasn’t military. It was personal.
They didn’t want access.
They wanted a reaction.
I check the clock.
It’s been six hours since Mara returned.
She hasn’t called.
Not directly. There was only a message—one I didn’t see until recently. Buried behind signal noise, logged through the secondary device. I missed it in the field, filtered out by the firewall.
I’m back. Safe.
Then another:We need to talk when you return.
It was there. Small. Honest. A breadcrumb instead of a flare.
