Tessa Rye had never considered herself paranoid.
She believed in protocol. Trusted the system — not because it was perfect, but because she believed it could be fixed from the inside.
She'd told Rook that once.
He hadn't laughed.He'd just said: "You haven't seen the wiring under the walls."
She was starting to.
It began with a routine form.
A simple request: transfer her father's old dical files from the Concord Archives. He'd served in the war against the Fyrka — one of the early alien incursions — before dying from "psychic residue failure," a phrase she never understood.
She expected to see scans. Wound assessnts. Battlefield logs.
What she got instead was a two-line reply.
CLEARANCE REVOKED.File: No Longer Exists.
Her stomach twisted.
She didn't tell anyone.
Later that week, during one of her assigned charity shifts, she was helping organize boxes when one of the transport officers asked her an innocent question.
"You're Tessa Rye, right? Daughter of Commander Alden Rye?"
She looked up, surprised.
"You knew my dad?"
The man smiled. "Everyone in Section Grey knew Alden. Tall guy. Silverblood unit. Refused Concord upgrades."
She blinked. "Wait—what? He never ntioned any unit called Silverblood."
The man froze.
Then smiled again — tighter.
"Must've been another Rye."
And walked away.
That night, she stayed in her room, cross-referencing archived veteran lists. The Silverblood Unit didn't exist.
Except it did.
Because her mother had once told her the na by accident, when she was half-asleep on painkillers. She said: "The Silverbloods don't die... they vanish."
Tessa thought it was a joke.
Now she wasn't sure.
She walked through the east hall of the Academy campus at midnight, the lights off, only moonlight casting her shadow forward.
Her hand hovered over her comm.
Rook's contact was there. One tap away.
But she didn't press it.
Not yet.
Because this wasn't his story.
It was hers now.
And soone had erased it.
Scene: Dorm 103 — Sa Night
Rook watched her movent through the trace beacon he'd planted on her boot weeks ago.
She'd spent four hours bouncing between district servers, old terminals, and shadownet indexes.
He watched the screen as she typed one word over and over:
"Silverblood."
He stared at it.
Then leaned back in his chair, whispering only to himself.
"She's starting to see."
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