It started with a wrong name.
A runner — barely seventeen — came back from a supply mission to the southern safehouse.
He reported the exchange went fine. Smooth. Clean.
But when Maya reviewed the logs later that night, she caught it:
He referred to a contact named "Alin."
There was no Alin.
There never had been.
Sila triple-checked the call records.
Encrypted pings to an unknown node— buried inside the university's power grid.
Stealth-class data routing.
The kind only the Helix used.
And it was coming from inside one of their cells.
They moved quickly.
Maya, Sila, two armed Fragments.
Three locations. Three suspected moles.
The Order's poison didn't come in the form of assassins now.
It came as whispers.
Smiles.
Familiar faces.
At the first location — the garden bunker — they found the transmitter. Hidden inside a cracked ventilation duct. Still warm.
Inside it: a voice file.
"Axis has accessed Spiral Below. Fracture stabilizing.
Directive remains: Delay, observe, sabotage."
No name attached.
Just a codename: "Wren."
Sila's voice was ice. "Wren's in the inner circle."
Maya nodded slowly. "Maybe more than one."
"They're not watching us from the outside anymore," Sila said.
"They're inside our loop."
At the second location — a makeshift medical station — they found signs of tampering.
Neural implants in two patients.
Passive receivers. Not transmitters.
The Order was listening to rebel thoughts.
Aarav arrived just after.
He didn't speak for a long time.
Then, quietly:
"They're not just copying us.
They're building a counter-fracture."
That night, Maya sat on the observatory ledge, staring at the spiral-shaped cracks forming in the glass.
"What if we can't trust anyone?"
Sila joined her. "Then we burn everything they touch."
Maya didn't reply.
Because deep down, a more dangerous question had begun to take shape.
What if Wren… was never a spy?
What if Wren was one of them who never knew it?
In the corner of the bunker, a girl named Mira sat humming to herself.
She wasn't on any list.
She hadn't been questioned.
But under her jacket sleeve, a faint white spiral tattoo pulsed softly in time with the electric hum of the generators.