The collar data was wrong.
Tavi sat cross-legged in the analysis vault, half-dressed in her cadet greys, hair still damp from the decon steam. Her terminal cast pale green light across her hands as she scrubbed the sync feed from Kael's last cycle—frame telemetry, biometric slope, depth progression. Everything looked standard on the surface. But it wasn't.
Not at 6.2 depth.
Not when the frame should've locked him out at 5.5.
She tapped the archive again. No override trigger. No frame resistance. Just… acceptance. Smooth alignment, no cortical feedback. As if the rig had known him.
As if it wanted to sync deeper.
She frowned. Not possible.
Training frames didn't want anything.
Outside the vault, footsteps passed in ordered cadence. Evening shift drills. The gravity hum shifted overhead as the station corrected orbit—adjusting for wind-drift above the frozen storm bands below.
Tavi kept scrolling.
She wasn't supposed to be running this level of diagnostic, but Instructor Jeno let her ghost the tools sometimes. Said she had "clean hands and a dangerous eye." She wasn't sure if that was a compliment.
A flicker on the feed caught her attention—a double spike, offset by 0.12 seconds. Too fast to be pilot error.
Or maybe not. Maybe Kael had twitched. Maybe she was imagining ghosts in his reaction chain.
But she didn't believe in ghosts. She believed in patterns.
Earlier that day, during sync drills, she'd watched Kael from her peripheral lens. He didn't move wrong. He moved like someone who knew the rules but didn't fit inside them.
Most retainers tried to fold into the structure—serve clean, earn merit, stay silent. Kael did that too. But there was an edge under it. Like he was pulling against the curve, even when still.
He'd caught her eye when Meros called him out. Said nothing. Just kept his balance like a stone in a river. Let the current break around him.
She respected that. She also hated it.
"Juno."
The voice snapped her out of the loop. Tavi straightened. Instructor Jeno, tall and sharp-faced, stood in the door. Not angry. Not warm. "You're not rostered for vault time tonight."
"I'm just finishing up diagnostics from Training Cycle Alpha," she said evenly.
"You mean Virex."
Tavi didn't answer.
Jeno crossed the floor, glanced at the screen. "You didn't see anything concerning?"
Tavi hesitated. "Nothing I can't flag later."
"Good." He paused. "Keep it quiet. He's already under observation. We don't need a full-blown sync panic over a commoner getting lucky."
She nodded once. Didn't say: Luck doesn't curve like that. She saved the scan. Encrypted the raw telemetry under a blind tag.
Folder ID: Fourth Protocol?
She didn't know why she typed it. Didn't know what it meant. But her hands were cold when she left the vault.