He told them Sunday morning, over eggs nobody was actually eating, because some conversations only happen when everyone's hands are busy enough not to fidget.
"There's a group," Cole said. "Calls itself the Choir. They're the ones sending the things that broke into the apartment. They've been watching me since before the Ministry scanner even glitched, probably. Maybe longer."
Reeve set his fork down slow, careful, like sudden movement might shatter something already fragile in the room. "You knew this and didn't tell us?"
"Didn't know all of it until two nights ago."
"But some of it. You knew some of it and sat here eating cake with us like nothing was wrong."
"Yeah." Cole didn't dress it up. Didn't soften it with a joke, which was, in itself, its own kind of confession. "Figured the less you both knew, the safer you'd be. Turns out that's not actually how safety works. Turns out it just means you get blindsided instead of prepared."
Mia hadn't said anything yet. She was looking at her plate, jaw tight, the specific stillness she wore right before she said something that cost her more than she wanted to admit.
"Is Dana actually trustworthy?" she asked finally. "Or is this just — you needing someone else in this who isn't us, so it stops feeling like our whole life is one big secret you're keeping."
The question landed harder than Cole expected. He sat with it a second before answering, because it deserved an honest answer and not a fast one.
"Little of both, probably," he admitted. "She's got her own reasons. Her sister's missing, connected to all this. But yeah — some part of me wanted someone in this who could actually fight back, instead of just you two hiding in a back room every time something walks through a wall."
"We're not helpless, Cole."
"Never said you were."
"You're acting like it. Sending us to the back room. Keeping secrets 'for our safety.' That's not partnership, that's just — you deciding what we can handle without asking us first." Mia's voice cracked, the sound of a wall she'd been rebuilding all week finally taking real damage. "I hate needing protecting. I've told you that my whole life. And you keep protecting me anyway, just quieter about it now."
Cole didn't have a clean answer for that. Reeve, surprisingly, filled the silence instead.
"She's right," he said, quiet but firm. "I get why you did it. I do. But you can't keep making yourself the only person standing between us and whatever this is. That's not sustainable, man. Eventually something's going to get through, and we're going to be standing there with nothing, because you never let us learn how to actually help."
Cole looked between them — his sister, sharp-edged and furious in the specific way that meant she cared more than she wanted anyone to see; his best friend, steady in a way that surprised him every time, considering how much of his own life Reeve spent convinced nobody noticed him at all.
"Okay," Cole said finally. "Then help me figure out what we're actually up against. No more back rooms. No more half of everything."
Mia's shoulders dropped, some of the fight draining out of them, replaced by something closer to relief.
"That's all I wanted," she said. "Just — the whole thing. Even if it's terrifying."
"It's pretty terrifying."
"I'd rather be terrified with the full picture than calm because you lied to me about the size of it."
Cole didn't have an argument for that. Didn't want one, honestly. He reached across the table instead, stole a piece of toast off Reeve's plate purely out of old habit, and let breakfast settle into something closer to normal, even with everything sitting unresolved underneath it.
School, that Monday, felt like a place that belonged to a different, simpler timeline. Cole sat through Conviction Class only half-listening, Okafor's chalk squeaking through a lecture on resonance thresholds that felt almost quaint compared to a faceless thing walking through a wall.
Reeve caught him after, in the hallway, phone already out. "You've been weird all class."
"Weirder than usual, or just regular weird?"
"There's a scale now?"
"There's always been a scale."
Reeve almost smiled, then didn't, glancing past Cole's shoulder toward the far end of the hall with an expression that shifted mid-thought.
"Hey. That girl's staring at you again."
Cole turned. Near the lockers, half-obscured by a cluster of underclassmen moving the wrong direction, a girl he didn't recognize stood with a battered notebook tucked under one arm, watching him with an expression that wasn't curiosity, exactly, and wasn't quite recognition either. Something more careful than either. Dark hair pulled back messy, sleeves pushed up past her elbows despite the weather, a posture that suggested she'd learned, at some point, to take up as little visible space as possible while still watching everything around her.
"You know her?" Cole asked.
"No. New, I think. Transferred a few weeks back. Keeps to herself." Reeve frowned slightly. "She was at the cafeteria that one day too. Writing something down. I remember because it was weird — everyone else was watching the drama, and she was watching you specifically, like she already knew something the rest of us didn't."
Cole looked back toward the lockers. The girl had already turned, notebook tucked tighter now, disappearing into the hallway's current of bodies without a backward glance.
Something about the shape of her — not her face, not anything he could have described if pressed — snagged briefly against the same part of him that had caught, once, on the grain of Dana's certainty in an interrogation room weeks ago. Gone before he could hold onto it. Familiar in a way he had no context for yet.
"Weird," he said, mostly to himself.
"You going to go talk to her?"
"And say what? 'Hi, sorry, do you happen to know anything about a hidden organization hunting resonance anomalies'? Might come off a little intense for a Monday."
Reeve huffed something close to a laugh. "Fair. Just — keep an eye on it. Feels like the kind of thing that matters later, even if it doesn't matter yet."
Cole didn't answer that directly. But he filed it away all the same, next to the corkboard, next to the handwriting, next to a growing list of things that didn't matter yet and probably wouldn't stay that way for long.
That evening, Dana called with an update that landed heavier than either of them expected.
"I ran the handwriting sample," she said, no preamble, straight to the point in the way Cole had started to appreciate about her. "Matched it against Ministry personnel files going back six years."
"And?"
"No match. Not officially, anyway." A pause, weighted, the specific hesitation of someone about to hand over something they weren't fully ready to say out loud. "But there's a partial. Old training records, before digital handwriting got phased out. Someone who left the program a long time ago. Name's redacted in every file I could access."
"Redacted by who?"
"That's the question, isn't it." Dana's voice was tight, controlled, the sound of someone forcing calm over something considerably less calm underneath. "Someone erased a person from Ministry history well enough that even my clearance can't fully restore the name. Whoever that is, Cole, they either work for the Choir now, or they used to work for the Ministry and became something the Ministry needed to pretend never existed."
"Or both."
"Or both," she agreed, quiet. "I don't like how many of our answers keep turning into worse questions."
Cole looked out his bedroom window, at the ordinary street below, the same streetlamp doing its ordinary job, no car idling tonight, no cold seeping through the glass.
"Welcome to my whole month," he said.
Neither of them laughed. Some jokes just didn't have anywhere left to land.
[End of Chapter 18]