The Puppeteer's Game

Chapter 22

Missing Thread

The lights in the diagnostics wing buzzed faintly, casting a cold hue over the rows of analog equipment. Emily sat hunched over the terminal again, the tension in her shoulders betraying the sleepless night behind her. The footage kept looping in her mind—James's voice, James's face, and the clearance trail that pointed straight to Miguel. Every timestamp. Every flicker of static—scrubbed clean.

Deliberate. Designed.

She didn't speak when Ramos handed her the hardcopy logs. Didn't acknowledge the quiet questions in his eyes. Instead, she reached for her field notebook, flipped to a fresh page, and wrote in block letters at the top:

CORDOVA. DIVERGENCE

She didn't share it. Not with Ramos. Not with Monteverde.

And especially not with Miguel.

Because she still didn't know if what she'd found was a warning or a trap.

Across the compound, Miguel moved like a man watching the world through glass. The edges of him had softened—less posture, more shadow. Since the video, he'd barely spoken. Every room he entered, he studied too long. He weighed every conversation like it might explode.

The worst part: he didn't know what scared him more—being framed... or being right.

Somewhere deep beneath the server floor, Monteverde keyed open an old relay terminal. Dust coated the screen. The keyboard was brittle from years of disuse.

It still worked.

He typed slowly. Carefully.

TO: THREAD

CLEARANCE CHAIN: OLDGLASS > M87-FRAGMENT > REDACTED

MESSAGE: The mask is shifting again. We may have pulled the wrong one.

He didn't wait for a reply. Thread never sent one. But the act of sending—committing it to record, even in the dark—felt like anchoring something that might otherwise drift away.

Three hours later, at the city's outer checkpoint, a Phantom courier collapsed just inside the motion sensors. No weapons. No defenses. His body was half-drained, jacket soaked with blood, face ghost-pale beneath a layer of dust and rain.

He didn't resist.

Didn't speak—until they dragged him into containment.

Then, in a hoarse whisper, he said:

"I never pulled the strings. I just followed the music."

And something about the way he said it—half delirious, half relieved—sent a cold ripple through every room his voice touched.

In the war room, Emily pinned his photo off-center—unlinked.

Not yet.

But when she reached into her pocket, drew out a single red thread, and looped it through James Cordova's photo—

No one asked what it meant.

They didn't need to.

***

The interrogation room was stripped of anything digital. No cameras. No AI-assisted pulse reads. Just dim lighting, a battered table, and three chairs—two of them empty. Ramos stood against the wall, arms crossed. Emily sat across from the courier, recorder off, pen in hand.

The courier flinched with every breath, like each inhale hurt more than the last. Blood crusted along his neck, trailing down into the collar of a once-white shirt now dulled to gray. Nerve damage, Emily guessed. Probably systemic. Whoever sent him hadn't meant for him to last long.