The Puppeteer's Game

Chapter 11

The Code

The operations room smelled of burnt coffee, dust, and old metal—memory etched into machines. Harsh overhead lights lit up maps, photos, and days-old notes. The chaos was gone. What remained felt sharper, focused. Like a blade honed, not flailing.

At the center table, Miguel flipped through the mentorship rosters with calm, deliberate precision—like searching wreckage for something still alive. The desperation from days ago was gone, replaced by focus. By control.

Monteverde hunched over a new stack, murmuring time stamps and scribbling cryptic shorthand. Across from him, Ramos highlighted records, his pen tapping a steady rhythm like a song only he knew.

Emily stood by the whiteboard, arms crossed, silent—watching Miguel, not the data. He was still sharp, their anchor. But the frayed edges she'd once noticed were gone, buried under something colder. Like he'd stopped resisting the weight and let it settle into his bones.

He didn't fidget. Didn't pace. Didn't tug at his sleeves the way he used to. Now, he moved with a kind of internal discipline, like he'd redrawn the lines inside himself—and made damn sure he wouldn't step over them again.

"These names repeat," he said quietly, eyes on the roster. "Different years, same program. Same supervisors. We missed the overlap."

Monteverde grunted in agreement. "Spread just wide enough to look unconnected. But it's there."

"Files weren't just deleted," Ramos added. "They were scrubbed. Like someone rewrote the whole history."

Miguel looked up then, gaze unreadable. "Then it's time we start rewriting it back."

Emily watched him a moment longer. He hadn't slept—she heard it in his voice, the heaviness in each word. But the old cracks? Gone.

And somehow, that scared her more.

Because the colder Miguel got, the closer they were to whatever truth was buried under all this.

And maybe—just maybe—they were already standing right in the middle of it.

***

It was Monteverde who noticed them first.

At the edge of the fifth ledger, between two forgotten entries, a faint glyph shimmered under blacklight—not quite a number, not quite a letter.

"That's not a typo," he said, quiet but certain. "This pattern shows up in at least three files. Two in the mentorship archives. One from the old case database."

Emily leaned over his shoulder, squinting. "Looks like a formatting glitch... but they're too consistent."

They spread the pages across the table like a puzzle. More symbols emerged—hidden in negative space or slight misalignments. Just off enough to be intentional. Just subtle enough to slip by.

Miguel stayed silent, pulled out a worn leather notebook, flipped through it, and tapped a section labeled Hollow Reach Cipher.

"I've seen this before," he said, voice low. "It's an encoding system—used by a group that worked through outreach programs back in the late '80s. They used different names. Rehabilitation. Social mentoring. It started clean. It didn't stay that way."

Emily glanced up. "You were on the case?"

"Not directly," Miguel said. "But I studied it. One of their internal glyphs showed up in a murder file I was reviewing years ago. The case went cold before we could connect the dots. Or maybe someone made sure we didn't."