Morgan talks for eleven minutes.
I stand at the end of the counter with my back to the room, the green receiver against my ear, and I let him go. He's good at narrative structure. Journalist habit. He's also good at identifying the relevant facts, which is the part that matters.
Here is what happened: after Heaven's Gate, he filed my story. Gas leak. Mass hallucination. Extremist fringe group. It ran. Nothing came back on him. He spent the next two years writing planning corruption pieces, a long series on fire safety in rental housing, a profile of a Hackney councilwoman he found genuinely interesting.
Strange things happened in his peripheral vision during those two years. He started having opinions about which roads to avoid after midnight. He didn't write about any of it.
"I trained myself not to," he says. "I'd taken one look at whatever that was — Heaven's Gate — and I'd made a decision. I wanted to keep my job. I wanted to keep my categorization of what reality was."
"That's a rational response," I say.
"I thought so." A pause. "Then the New Compact activated."
He tells me about the morning his byline appeared on four stories he'd never written.
I stop watching the room. I turn fully toward the wall.
---
Four articles. Simultaneously. On four separate news services at 6:17 AM on a Tuesday. His name, his usual style — close enough that a general editor wouldn't flag it. He read all four before he got out of bed. Then he sat on the edge of his mattress for a while.
"A network of connected historical sites across the Northern Hemisphere." Recent archaeological surveys. Heritage designation processes. Credible, sourced, the kind of background piece that runs once and stops anyone from looking twice.
Also mapping every active thin place in the Northern Hemisphere, with activation-point timing data Morgan had no way to have.
"How did you know it was wrong?" I ask.
"It was right," he says. "That was the problem. I checked everything. The archaeological citations, the heritage classifications — all verifiable. The timing data I couldn't source, so I kept pulling on it. Eventually I found a notation string that matched something I'd seen before." A pause. "Documents you shared with me. Before the Heaven's Gate piece. You used the same date-notation format for event sequencing."
I think about this. He's very good.
"I don't actually know what any of this is," Morgan says. "I know you know. I helped you manage a narrative that covered up something real, and now my name was used to publish a different one covering up something different. I'm not asking to be involved." A pause. "I'm asking if I already am."
"Yes," I say. "You are."
The sound he makes isn't surprise. It's the sound of something confirmed.
"Okay," he says. "Then what does that mean?"
---
I tell him enough. There's a calibration to this that I've been learning — what someone can use without the full weight of it landing on them at once. I tell him: there's a network of sites that function differently than ordinary locations. There are entities targeting that network. Someone used his byline to publish specific, accurate information about those sites — packaged as journalism so it would be archived, indexed, and never questioned.
I don't say Witnesses. I don't say Collectors. Not yet.
"Where did the timing data come from?" he asks. Right question. That's why he's good at this.
"I have a theory," I say. "I'm working on it."
"The sequence," he says. "Not just the locations — the specific order they activated. Someone knew that."
"Yes. Short list of people."
A moment. "Can I come in? In person. I won't file it. I just think this goes better face to face."
He's right.
"Diner on Holloway Road," I say. "Come on a weekday. Ask for Ro. Come after dark."
I hear him writing it down.
---
I hang up and stand at the counter for a moment before I turn around. The diner smells like coffee and the residue of something Jules was cooking earlier — an experiment, she'd said, and I'd learned not to ask about those. Elias is at his window table with his pen. Caelan is across from him, reading something with the particular attention he gives things he doesn't fully trust yet.
I turn around and tell them.
"The articles mapped every active thin place in the Northern Hemisphere. Activation-point timing data. Published through my journalist contact's forged byline."
Caelan looks up.
"The timing data only existed in Assembly records during the emergency session. First forty-eight hours."
The room is quiet in a very specific way.
I put the seventy-three names in front of me and Ailsa's crossing-point map beside it. The morning light through the window has committed to being yellow and slightly dusty across the floor.
"Who was in the session," Elias says. Not quite a question.
"Court representatives. Assembly pages. Cerunnos's faction, the Queen's delegation." I stop. "Caelan. You. Maren's representative."
Caelan pulls out his phone — with the particular skepticism he applies to all devices, the look of someone who finds it functional in the way you find a hammer functional, not in the way you'd choose to spend time with it — and scrolls. "Eleven pages. I know four. Three I don't recognize. One of the three has been in post eleven months." He looks up. "Minimum service is two years."
"How certain are you?"
"Certain enough to ask Gavin." He hands me the phone so I can see the name. I don't recognize it, which isn't itself meaningful — I don't know most Assembly pages. But the record shows eleven months, single placement, no prior service listed. That last part is meaningful. Pages are vetted through a process that should leave a paper trail going back years.
I hand it back.
"We can't bring this to the Assembly," Elias says. He's been writing, which he does continuously and I've stopped tracking. Three pens so far this morning. He pushes a page toward me: three columns — what we know, what we can confirm, what needs a channel outside the network. The third column is the longest. "If the page is still in place, we tip our hand. If she's already been warned—"
"Then Dominika loses her cover," I say. "Yes."
I look at the other problem sitting in the middle column: Fionn. Who visited this room, catalogued it, confirmed Margaret was here, and left saying her name like a period at the end of a sentence. Who has been working for the Collectors for three months minimum. Who was Maren's subordinate, which means either Maren knew and sent him as a signal, or Maren's network has been compromised from the inside, or both.
Too many possibilities. We need Dominika's intelligence to know which ones to keep.
Margaret comes out of the back, reads the table in one look, and says: "Should I make more coffee?"
"Yes," I say.
She goes.
---
I find Caelan in the kitchen at noon.
He's standing by the prep counter, which means he came looking for me. We both know I'm here because the diner has people in it and the kitchen doesn't and sometimes you need thirty seconds that aren't load-bearing. The kitchen smells like the lamb stew Denise prepped last night — it needs four more hours and it's already starting to smell like it might be worth it.
"Gavin's checking the service history," he says. "Few hours."
"And then?"
"Then we take it to the Queen. Not Cerunnos. Not the session. Directly." He says this with the flatness of someone who's already run the calculation twice and arrived at the same answer both times. "She'll want to know there's a proxy in her own chamber. Her interests and ours are aligned on that point — for now."
"For now" does the work he intended. I file it.
"Maren," I say. "If she had observational access to the session, she's on the short list too."
"Yes." He doesn't look surprised that I'm saying it. "But Maren's model is accumulation. She collects things to trade. She offers intelligence; she doesn't burn it. Feeding the Collectors the activation map removes the thing she's been positioning herself to sell. That's inconsistent with every move she's made since we've known her."
It's the same logic I'd landed on at the table. We're arriving at the same problem from two directions: too many people with access, not enough daylight between their motivations.
"Ailsa," I say. "She knew Dominika before the compact. Warsaw conference, three years ago."
He nods once. "That's the channel."
Pre-network. Pre-compact. Pre-everything that's been compromised or watched or mapped. Two archivists who met at a conference before any of this was formalized, who swapped notes about notation systems and probably argued about cataloguing in the specific way of people who feel strongly about cataloguing. That connection lives in a part of the world the Collectors haven't been able to touch yet, because it predates the thing they've been following.
I'm halfway to the door when he says, "Ro."
I stop.
"The articles. The byline. The timing data." He says it in the way he says things he wants me to actually hear. "Someone gave the Collectors a working map of every active thin place — and then burned cover for a journalist who helped you three years ago." A pause. "They knew about Morgan."
I stand in the doorway.
Morgan. Who isn't in the network, isn't in the compact, isn't in any file I've shared with anyone inside the Assembly. Who helped me manage a story once and then went back to his life and his planning corruption pieces and his opinions about which roads to avoid after dark.
I think about Fionn at the diner counter. Ordering whiskey. Cataloguing the room.
I think about the thirty-seven years of Collector front records in Elias's bag. Seventy-three names. People who passed through the network without knowing what it was. Witnesses who were targeted, or monitored, or scheduled.
The network had contacts. It had connections. It had everyone who'd ever been adjacent to what Ro Blackwood was doing, going back years before she understood what she was doing.
Morgan's name might be in that bag.
"How long have they known about him," I say. It comes out flat. Not really a question — more a fact landing.
Caelan says nothing. He doesn't know. I know he doesn't know.
I go back to the table. I pick up the seventy-three names. I start reading them from the top.