Chapter 13: Reyes Hears a Name

Reyes heard the name on a Tuesday, from a maintenance log he wasn't supposed to be reading.

It wasn't operational intelligence. It was a supply requisition — medical grade, cross-referenced against the facility's standing inventory, flagged for review because the quantities exceeded what seven operatives would need for a standard month. Somebody had doubled the antiseptic order. Somebody had requested a specific type of wound dressing that Reyes had only ever seen used for intercostal injuries, the kind that came from blunt trauma rather than clean cuts. Somebody had added, at the bottom of the requisition in Marcus's handwriting, a note that said *secondary bunk, east corridor, no visitors without prior clearance.*

He hadn't been looking for it. He'd been inventorying the storage room adjacent to the fabrication cell, a routine job Marcus had assigned him that morning, and the requisition had been sitting on top of a supply crate in plain sight because someone had pulled it to cross-check against the physical stock and hadn't put it back in the folder. He'd picked it up automatically. He'd read it the way you read anything in a resistance cell, which is carefully and completely, because incomplete information gets people killed and that is the first thing you learn.