OPERATION WINTERSPINE (Strings Between Us Book 2)

CHAPTER NINETEEN: OF VEIL-CODED GHOSTS AND THE GIRL WHO CLOSED THE CURTAIN

That's how I knew. The veil dimmed. The lighting flickered—not enough to trigger alerts, just enough to shift tone. To lie.

And in that breath between heartbeats? Something moved. Not a student. Not a teacher. Not something seen—not yet. But I felt it.

My acoustic sensors pulsed—once, twice—then locked. A rhythm folding through the vent shafts just behind the northern Commons. A non-native sound signature. Light. Intentional. Metal brushing metal. Weight against breath. A pressure ripple that didn't belong.

Forty seconds. That's all the veil gave us. That's all I needed.

"Right flank," I said, already turning toward the vent line.

I didn't wait for confirmation. Didn't ask for cover. That's not how we work.

Alexie cloaked the field. Thres locked the fallback. Saichel, Xythe, and Ari were already synced around Khaizer Dylan, hidden in plain sight beneath every student's forced laughter.

That made me the intercept. It's always me. They call me Ghost—but ghosts don't hunt. I do.

I moved like shadow down the perimeter rail, cutting left toward the maintenance shaft. My gloves recalibrated mid-stride—switching from passive trace to full acoustic triangulation. The pressure drop deepened. Then confirmed it.

Three signals. Soft. Ghost-light. Intermittent.

Too silent for students. Too skilled for staff. And just fractured enough to feel staged.

"Not clean," I muttered.

I tapped my left glove once. The razors ejected with a near-silent hum—extended wide for sweep mode. Not for slicing. Not yet. The sweep pulse flared blue, then filtered to red.

No heat signature.
No faculty tag.
No squad code. No biometric print.

Just noise. Just... echoes.

Ghosts in a school already full of secrets. Too neat to be coincidence. Too messy to be mission-clear.

My jaw locked. I knew the question before it even formed.

Halcyon?...Maybe. But that's the real danger. We don't know how the Halcyon Pact works. No one does.

They don't announce themselves. They don't send ultimatums. They send erasure. They send silence. They send nothing.

So if this was them, it wasn't an arrival. It was a whisper.

But what if it wasn't? What if this wasn't Halcyon at all? What if someone else was testing the perimeter—seeing what we'd do? What if someone inside wanted it to look like Halcyon had breached?

Too many questions. Too little time. And still—I had to make the call.

The sensors pinged again. Tighter now. The signals were moving away. Not an attack. A lure. Someone wanted us to follow. Someone wanted me to follow.

I didn't hesitate. I flicked my wrist. The razors retracted. Silent mode: engaged.

No fight. Not yet. Just follow the trail. Just track the noise. Because this wasn't an ambush. It was a breadcrumb trail—leading me exactly where someone wanted.

So I ran. Fast. Controlled. Through maintenance tunnels sealed during last month's lockdown drills. Past the drone-sensor blind spots I personally rewired last semester.

And still the signal led me—upward.
One floor.
Two.
Three.

Until it vanished. Until I hit the Crossward Gate. The junction was supposed to be locked. Triple-sealed. Court-only access. But the access ring had been cracked. Not forced. Not exploded. Accessed. From inside. The override logs were wiped. The pulse reader scrambled. But the signature? Faint, but real. Not ours.

"Alexie," I whispered into the comm, barely audible. "It's not an attack."

"Copy," she replied, her voice clipped. "What is it?"

I stared at the gate. I ran the scan again. Blank. I looked at the corridor behind me. Empty.

"What is it?" she repeated.

I swallowed.

"Something worse."

Pause.

"What?"

I exhaled through my teeth. "A test run."

Silence.

Because we weren't just fighting the Halcyon Pact. Maybe we're fighting more shadows and ghosts than we expect. And that meant one thing:

We have less time than we thought.