OPERATION WINTERSPINE (Strings Between Us Book 2)

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: OF SIGNALS THAT BREACHED, SYSTEMS THAT FRACTURED,

Lyle stepped closer. "How did it get to you?"

Tofer's fingers tapped rapidly against the side of his bracer. A low tone thrummed from the interface as he pulled up another screen—this one darker, red-threaded, built on blacklisted sublayers the Court wasn't meant to monitor anymore.

A dead system remembered.

A dead name woke up.

"I was cross-tracking residual signals in the Quiet Zones," he began. "Background sweeps. Just routine scrub. I wasn't scanning for Echo-class signatures—I didn't even have access to those fields."

"Then how did it break through?" Keryn asked, her voice sharper now, calculating.

Tofer's eyes didn't leave the screen. "Because it wasn't just a pulse. It was a memory artifact. A residual echo—bounced off a decayed memory shell in the Veilfall system."

"Tito Cassiel and Tita Celia?" Seb asked, brows narrowing, the steel of his claws catching the dim light.

"Yeah," Tofer confirmed. "The Veilfall system cracked. Just a hairline fracture—but it was enough. The system hiccupped, and Khaizer's real pulse leaked out. Not all of it. Just... enough to bleed a name into the noise."

He zoomed in on the jagged waveform. "This. This here. That spike? It carries ECHO-9's original fractal ID tag. Scrambled, corrupted, but not erased. Like something deeper inside him just remembered who it used to be—and screamed."

"And you caught it," Lyle said flatly.

Tofer's jaw tensed. "No. It caught me. My sensor nodes weren't built to detect Halcyon patterns, but something in the signal recognized me. Latched onto one of my dormant jammer threads and dragged me into the bleed. It wanted to be found."

A long silence stretched in the Sigil Heart Hall.

Then Saichel, quiet for once, murmured, "You saying that the Frost Monarch's pulse reached out?"

Tofer looked up.

"It didn't reach out," he said. "It broke free."

"Damn. That's why they moved. That's why they went after him," Seb said, like the picture is sharpening in his mind."Not to kill him. To confirm: that he's still alive."

That he's still alive. That their weapon isn't lost. Only... hidden.

Every breath in that sanctum became deliberate. Quiet. Cold. I could feel the residual hum of the table against my palms, the low vibration of a pulse no one else could hear.

There are too many variables now. Too many convergences. The hum of the war table vibrated through my fingertips. I traced the faint lines of the holographic schematics with my gaze, every flicker of light a potential thread of cause and effect. We don't know if we're dealing with the Halcyon Pact alone—or something older, buried deeper in the systems they left behind.

Alexie clenched her fist. I could hear the faint scrape of nails against her palm, see the tension in her jaw, smell the faint tang of sweat under the recycled air. "This is my fault. If I just knew how to contact Mommy and Daddy, we wouldn't be having trouble hiding Khaizer."

"No, Lex. This wasn't your fault," I said gently, my voice low, measured, each word deliberate. "This was inevitable. The two headmasters knew that. They saw it coming."

"That's why they created the Sovereign-Ardent Alliance Program," Saichel added, eyes flicking to me, calm but sharp. "That's why it was on your desk before. It was their bait."

"And that's why they let Ari transfer to SAA instead of sending her back to Celestine. Tita Dana knew, too," Keryn said, as if the pieces were finally settling into a pattern.

I could see it now—the structure beneath the chaos. Every move deliberate. Calculated. Like an algorithm running in real time. They had a hunch, and instead of stopping it, they let it unfold.

"They positioned the Ardent Court for this," I said, voice cold and precise, eyes scanning the holographic grid across the table. "We're exactly where they wanted us. They want us to end it—because it began with the original members, and now they expect the current Court to finish what they started."

"And because they saw how Ari and Khaizer got along, they knew we wouldn't let anything happen to him," Thres said, a quiet certainty in his tone. The faint metallic echo of his voice seemed to hang in the recycled air.

Lyle rose, hands firm on the table. His Compass Ring caught the projection lights, glinting like a silent sigil of authority.

"Effective immediately," he declared, voice sharp, commanding, steel wrapped in frost. "Supreme Allievo Academy is under full Court surveillance. All faculty movements are flagged. All council members are monitored. All students are watched. All shadow protocols fully deployed."

He paused. The air felt heavier in that instant, electric almost, like the room itself was holding its breath.

"We take no chances. Not now."

He let the silence stretch, let the weight of his words anchor the room. Let us feel the shift in purpose, in alignment, in the subtle tightening of our collective pulse.

Then he looked around the table—eyes steady, unflinching, cutting through shadows and projection light alike.

"We're no longer preventing a war," he said. "We're already in it."