I hadn’t known Jessika had been part of the team the Utopials had brought together to deal with Cancer. She was sitting down at the other end of the cabin, next to Loi. The pair of them had been sharing quite a bit of time since the Trail Ranger had left Nkya’s base camp. And both of them had pasts I didn’t know about. Not covered up, but it would clearly take a lot of digging to provide a full timeline for both of them.

Of course, you could say the same for Yuri, Callum, and Alik, too. More so, given how many layers of security their records were buried under. But they were my direct route into the real policy makers—the ones who mattered. The ones who logically could be the source of human paranoia toward the Olyix, and the phenomenal resources various human factions had wasted by spying on them. I had been convinced that one of them was working for an unseen malicious enemy who opposed every benefit the Olyix had brought to the Sol system. Kandara had been an outside chance, as well; it had been an odd decision for the Utopial senior council to bring her in to eliminate the sabotage. I thought it might be Callum, but now it seemed he didn’t approve of her at all. Still, that much coincidence was unusual; perhaps God was trying to tell me something…

Alik nodded ruefully after Kandara finished telling her story. “So that’s what happened to Cancer. I always wondered.”

“Let me guess,” Yuri said. “Your precious Bureau never found out who had employed Cancer to sabotage Bremble’s industrial stations and Onysko’s research teams.”

“We looked,” Callum said. “For years. But for all she was a complete bitch, Cancer was good. She left very little trace, digital or physical.”

“Plenty took her place,” Alik growled. “There’s still a lot of dark ops teams duking it out with national agencies and corporate security. Her death didn’t change anything.”

“No big immediate change,” I said. “But you’d never be able to crack New York’s shield files these days. What about Bremble and Onysko?”

“Secure,” Callum confirmed. “The incident with Cancer made us realize how exposed we were. We use G8Turings to manage and filter our critical networks now. The senior council made the Bureau swallow its pride and set up some exchanges with Sol agencies to share information on activists and fanatics. We developed our own safeguard routines.”

“So everyone’s a winner,” Alik grumbled. “Except the people whose lives she ruined before you caught up with her.”

“She won’t ruin any more lives,” Kandara said. “That’s a good result to me.”

“The people who hired her will just carry on,” Alik said. “Killing her was just a glitch to their plans; it didn’t solve anything.”

Kandara gave him a frigid stare. “I didn’t kill her. She committed suicide.”

“You should have made a deal.”

“I offered.”