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up.

The looking up was not a decision. It came from the animal knowledge that something in the room had changed, knowledge he had been developing since the basement. In the fourteen months since then, it had produced the specific quality of attention he now carried in rooms, not watchfulness, which was too deliberate to be reliable, but the more animal kind that noticed before deciding to notice.

He looked up.

Across the chamber, at the right-side visitors' gallery, there was a man in a suit. The man was standing with a group of four people who were carrying the credentials of the parliamentary observers credentialing program, which was the program the parliament had established in November to allow public and professional observers to attend sessions. The credentials were lanyards. The man's lanyard was the lanyard of the parliamentary observers program.

The man was one of the seventeen faces.

He was the eighth face, which was the face Yousef had crossmatched in October from the ceremony footage and had filed in the records on the second device as: male, approximately 45, IRGC moderate delegation, southern sector, last public appearance: signing ceremony October 14.

He was in the visitors' gallery with a legitimate observers lanyard.

Yousef's breathing changed.

He felt the specific tightening across his shoulders that was the body's knowledge arriving before the mind's, which was the body saying: something in this room is wrong, in the specific way of an animal in a room with a predator before the predator has moved. He had felt this twice before.

The first time had been in the basement when the second sweep team had come and the specific quality of the sweep had been wrong in a way he had not been able to articulate until afterward. The second time had been in October, in the parliament corridor, when two members of the moderate IRGC delegation had been present at a committee briefing that they had no official reason to attend.

He was feeling it for the third time.

He looked back at his briefing folder.



He read the third paragraph four times without taking in a single word.

He looked up and caught the man

looking at him.

The man looked away first.

He whispered to himself,



this is important information

. He folded it into the part of his mind that had been getting full recently.

* * *

He found the second face at 09:06.

The second face was in the south corridor, visible through the chamber's south-side windows that looked into the connecting corridor, which was the corridor used for the committee staff and the administrative support personnel.

The second face was in the corridor wearing the administrative support identification that the parliament's administrative division used, the identification that administrative support staff wore, the lanyard with the blue edge rather than the green edge that the observers wore.

The second face was the thirteenth face, which was the face he had crossmatched from the ceremony footage as: male, approximately 52, IRGC hardline-adjacent delegation, last public appearance: September 29, three weeks before the signing.

Blue-edge lanyard.

Blue-edge meant administrative and required a background clearance. The background clearance process for administrative staff at the parliament took six weeks. Someone had processed the clearance. The credentialing system had been compromised.

He looked at the chamber door. Two of the seventeen were inside the parliament building on the day of a session. Their purpose was unknown, but they were here with credentials that required institutional access, which meant the access had been arranged in advance, not improvised.

Fourteen minutes until the session opened. Fourteen minutes.

* * *

He had fourteen minutes.

W

ha

t do I do with fourteen minutes?

Four months of parliamentary experience. Seven months running an encrypted network from the second device in the inner pocket of his non-parliamentary jacket. Three years building toward this specific parliament from the belief that the architecture of what came after mattered as much as the architecture of getting there. In his case, something else applied: he had read the

rule on the first page of the first notebook three years ago and had been living by it since.



The rule was: do not act on incomplete information. Get the information. Then act.

He had three options.

The first option was the parliamentary security committee, which was the committee whose jurisdiction covered exactly this kind of infiltration and which was the committee that could act with institutional authority. He had been on the distribution list for four months. He knew the committee's response protocol: report, confirm, assess, escalate. The protocol required approximately four hours from report to escalation. He had fourteen minutes.

The second option was the second device. He had three contacts on the second device.

Lyla

, who was in the building without windows and who would know in forty seconds what he knew and who would tell him what to do with the knowledge. Elias, who was somewhere. And the Nicosia station channel, which was the operational channel.

The third option was to do nothing, wait, watch, know where the two faces were and what they were doing, add the information to the account he was keeping, and let the account be the thing until it required action.

He thought about the third option.

The

third option is the parliament op

tion. The parliament option is to

carry the knowledge with the specific patience of someone who intends to outlast everyone who is wrong. He had been doing this since October. He had been carrying two hundred and forty-three faces in the inner pocket of his non-parliamentary jacket for seven months. The carrying had not been the action. The carrying had been the preparation for the action.

T

his is the action.

He picked up the second device under the briefing folder, which was the specific way of using a device in a parliamentary session that he had learned in October and that was indistinguishable, from the angle of the session cameras and the adjacent members, from the act of looking at a committee document in a manila folder.

He composed the message.

Three words:

They are here.

He sent it,

p

ut the device under the folder, and

looked at his briefing folder.

He read the third paragraph again.

He still did not take in a single word.

* * *

The reply came in forty seconds.

He had been counting. The counting

was not deliberate because

he was not watching a clock. He was aware of time the way he had been aware of

time in the basement. It was

the specific awareness of a person who knew that the time between sending and receiving was a time in which anything could change and in which he needed to hold the specific stillness of someone who was in a parliamentary session and was also waiting.

He had held the stillness.

The reply was four words:

Do not move yet.

He read it.

He read it again.

He thought of Lyla. She had been watching the network for three days, and the message made sense in that context. The appearance of the two faces was part of the Splinter's preparation phase, which occupied a specific position in the timeline, and the timeline revealed something about what they were doing here.

He knew that

"

d

o not move yet" means

the appearance is expected and the appearance tells me something I need to know before we act on it.

He closed the device and

put it in his pocket.

The session opening call came at 09:07.

He put his hands on the briefing folder. It held the agricultural subsidy document, the procurement amendment summary, and the committee correspondence from the week. The agricultural subsidy document was the one he had been following since the second reading. He placed his hands on it and was in the parliament session and the operation simultaneously. Both were real, both required his attention, and he would give both his attention because that was what the next eighteen days required and because he had been building toward both for three years.

T

wenty-one days ago I was a junior parliamentarian who cared about agricultural subsidies.

He almost smiled.

He still cared about agricultural subsidies. The eastern catchment calculation was wrong in the current draft, and Sadeghi's modification corrected it. This mattered to the farmers in the third district, to the water management framework, and to the kind of parliament that did the work parliaments were supposed to do.

He was going to vote on this. He was also watching two people who should not be in the building. Both were true. Both were the work.

He looked at the presiding member.

The eighth face was in the gallery. The man was looking at the presiding member, which was where you looked when the session opened if you were an observer.

He was looking at the presiding member too. They were both watching the session, but not the same thing. He did not smile. He opened his briefing folder and waited.

* * *

The agricultural subsidy session ran from 09:08 to 11:40.

He was present for all of it. He was present in the specific way of a person who was in two sessions simultaneously, which was: the parliamentary session and the operational session, which were the sessions he was running in parallel, which was the parallel running he had been doing since October and that he had become, across that period, good at.

In the parliamentary session,

Sadeghi presented the revised twelve-point amendment with two modifications from the first reading. The modifications were the modifications to the eastern catchment calculation that he had raised in committee six weeks ago and that he had been tracking through the revision process since. The modifications were correct. They addressed the specific formula problem he had identified and they addressed it without introducing the secondary allocation problem that the first proposed revision had introduced, which was the revision that Farnaz had caught in her review and that had gone back to committee for the third time.

He voted yes on three procedural motions. He voted no on one, which was the motion to delay the second reading for additional committee consideration. He opposed it because the committee had had the document for six weeks and had revised it three times

,

and the additional consideration was the specific kind of consideration that produced indefinite delay rather than improved legislation.

In four months he had learned to identify the delay motions from the genuine-concern motions. The delay motions came from members who opposed the substance and had run out of substantive objections.

The motion failed. The second reading passed. He noted both with the specific satisfaction of someone who had been following a piece of legislation through three revisions and had arrived at the correct version.

He noted both.

The operational session. The eighth face was in the gallery for the full 09:08 to 11:40 period, visible whenever he looked up, at the intervals he had trained himself to keep so as not to appear to be watching the gallery, once every twelve minutes. The thirteenth face was visible in the south corridor at 09:08 and 09:34, then not visible after 09:34, which meant either the corridor was no longer the location or the thirteenth face had moved to a location he could not see from his seat. He filed it as location unknown from 09:34.

At 10:15 he sent a second message on the second device.

The message said:

Face 8 in gallery, confirmed. Face 13 south corridor, last seen 09:34, current location unknown.

The reply

came in sixty seconds.

Both expected. We have the corridor. What are they

doing?

He thought about this. He composed:

Observing session. No unusual behavior visible.

He sent it.

The reply said:

Yes. That is the behavior.

He thought about this for a long time.

Observing the session was the behavior they were here for. What does observing a parliamentary session tell a Splinter operation? It tells them the parliament is functioning. It tells them something about Yousef, he was present in the second row of the center block, voting on agricultural subsidies, and, as far as they could tell, unaware of them.

They were confirming that the parliamentary contact in the network did not know they were here. That was the information they came to get. He gave them the correct information by giving them no information. Yes.

He voted on the final procedural motion of the morning session at 11:32. He voted yes.

* * *

Between the morning and afternoon sessions he did three things.

The first was going to the cafeteria, getting food, and eating it, the thing a junior member of parliament did in the lunch break between sessions, the thing he did every Tuesday. He ate with Farnaz, who was there at the same time, eating and reading the committee correspondence she had been accumulating since Monday.

"The Sadeghi modification on the eastern catchment," she said.

"Yes, finally," he replied.

"I was watching you," she said. "You voted on it faster than you usually vote."

"I was ready," he said.

"Yes," she said.

He did not tell her about the eighth face.

He considered whether not telling her was the right decision. She was the right kind of lawyer in the right kind of parliament. She was also in the parliament, and the parliament’s business was not this yet. The parliament’s security committee would know, but not today.

He ate and went back to his office.

The second thing: he checked the second device. Two new messages from the network channel appeared. The first said that Face 13 had relocated to the east corridor administrative office, confirmed building access badge, room 14 east wing. The second said do nothing. Watch the session. The session needed to be the session.

Yes.

He considered what it meant that the Splinter had sent two people into the parliament building on a session day with legitimate credentials. They were confirming that the parliament was stable and that the parliamentary contact was not alarmed. If the contact were alarmed, the contact would behave differently in the session. He had to not behave differently in the session.

He had voted no on the delay motion and would have done so regardless. Yes.

He thought about Leila.

He had been thinking about Leila since the Nicosia meeting. Leila was the journalist who understood things she could not yet publish and kept a notebook that was not the journalism notebook. She needed to know eventually, not because it would change what she did in the next eighteen days, but because when the eighteen days were over, the account needed to be written by the person who could write it correctly.

Not yet. When the eighteen days were over.

He remembered the rule he had derived at nineteen, the rule he had been living by since, which had produced the specific discipline he carried in the parliament and in the operation: do not act on incomplete information. Get the information, then act.

The information was not yet complete.

Eighteen days.

The third thing was to call Nasim.

He called Nasim from the parliament garden at 11:55.

He called from the parliamentary device, which was the device for calls that were the calls of a junior member of parliament calling a physician in the Shemiran district, which was what the call was.

"Thursday gallery." Nasim said.

"Yes." Yousef said.

"Something else." He added.

He told Nasim about the eighth face and the thirteenth face, the observer’s lanyard and the administrative badge, what Lyla had said about both being expected, and what he had understood about why they were there.

"They came to confirm you don’t know they’re there," Nasim said.

"Yes," Yousef replied.

"And you have now confirmed this?" Nasim said.

"Yes," Yousef said.

"For the duration," he said, then fell quiet.

"I am going to attend the afternoon session on the procurement amendment," he said.

"Yes," Nasim replied.

"I am going to vote on the procurement amendment."

"Yes."

"The procurement amendment matters."

"Yes."

He paused.

"The

carrying is heavier when you are in the thing you were building toward. In October I was in the campaign and I was watching seventeen faces and I was building. Now I am in the parliament and I am voting and I am also watching the same faces inside the building I built toward.

"

Nasim said nothing for a moment. Then he

replied, "Yes

.

"

Not the

‘

yes

’

of agreement. The yes of someone who had been watching the carrying from the gallery since November and who was not going to diminish it.

He said, "I know. Thursday."

Yousef said, "Thursday."

He said it the way he said things that needed to be said in the context of things that also needed to be said. The procurement amendment mattered, and the Splinter mattered. Both of those things were true, and both were the work. The work was the work.

He went back inside and headed to the cafeteria. After eating, he went to the afternoon session and voted on the procurement amendment.

He walked out of the chamber at 17:15.

Dariush was at the east entrance on the way out, same as every day. "Good evening," he said.

"Good evening," Yousef replied.

"How is your daughter settling into the university?"

"She says the professors are different from what she expected," Dariush said.

"Different how?"

"She says they talk to them like adults."

"Yes," Yousef said. "They are."

"She is surprised by this," Dariush said.

"She will stop being surprised by it," Yousef replied.

He went to his car.

He sat in his car for a moment.

He thought about the eighth face, who had been in the gallery for the full morning session and who had left before the afternoon session, which was the information the network channel had confirmed at 13:40.

He thought about the thirteenth face, who had been in the administrative office in the east wing until 14:20 and had left the building at 14:23, which was the information he had received on the second device during the afternoon session, in the specific way of receiving information on the second device during a session, which was: manila folder, hand below the table, screen angled away from the adjacent member.

They came. They observed. They left. They confirmed what they needed to confirm. He had given them the correct information by being the person he was.

He considered who he was: a junior member of parliament who had voted on the agricultural subsidy second reading and the procurement amendment first reading on a Tuesday in April, who had eaten in the cafeteria with Farnaz, and who had called Nasim from

the garden. That was who he was. It was also the person who sent three words on the second device at 09:08 and knew what the three words meant. Both were true. Both were him.

He started the car,

d

rove home, and

made tea.

He sat at the kitchen table.

He opened the notebook and wrote: Day 4 of 21. Both faces present and departed. Parliament functioning. Agricultural amendment second reading passed. Procurement amendment first reading in progress.

He looked at what he had written.

T

wenty-one days ago I was a junior parliamentarian who cared about agricultural subsidies.

He almost smiled and drank his tea. He did not smile. Then he wrote the next line.

CHAPTER 10

The Data Cable

The Indian Ocean. A screen at 3 AM. What lies beneath.

* * *

The device was smaller than a briefcase.

This was the first thing that the analysis produced that s

he had not expected. S

he had built her threat framework around the assumption that a device capable of producing an eleven-second disruption of a major undersea cable node would be large enough to appear in the standard sensor profiles that the cable maintenance systems used to monitor their infrastructure. The maintenance systems were calibrated for objects of a minimum size because the minimum size was the size that the objects in that category had always been. The device was not the size that the objects in that category had always been.

The device was fourteen centimeters by nine centimeters by six centimeters.

She had found the dimensions in the feed data on day nine at 03:14 AM.

She had shifted to the schedule of the data on day five, which was the day she had understood that the feed was moving at night and that waiting for morning to look at what the night had produced was the specific inefficiency she could not afford in a twelve-day window. She had been sle

eping when the feed was quiet,

four hours in the middle of the afternoon, when the Indian Ocean maintenance sy

stems ran their standard cycles, produced nothing new,

and working when it was moving.

The feed had been moving at night since day seven.

The history of undersea cable sabotage that she had built into the threat framework in 2026 had prepared her for the specific kind of evidence she was looking for. In 2023 and 2

024, the Baltic Sea incidents

, the damage to the Balticconnector pipeline and multiple undersea cables attributed to state actors had produced a forensic record that was the first detailed account of what state-level undersea infrastructure sabotage looked like in the monitoring data. The Baltic record was the one she had studied. It told her what to look for. The Baltic devices had been large, which was the difference she had not anticipated. The devices she was looking at were not the Baltic devices.

She had found the dimensions in the feed data on day nine at 03:14 AM, which was the time she was at the screen.

The specific feed she had been watching was the cable maintenance telemetry from the Sri Lanka monitoring station, which was one of the three nodes and which was the node whose

monitoring data she had the best access to through the Nicosia channel. The telemetry was the standard maintenance output, which was the output of the sensors that ran along the cable route and that produced, in normal operation, the specific pattern of outputs that indicated a cable in normal operation.

The pattern had changed on day six.

She noticed the change on day seven. She had been watching for it since day three, when she understood from the Splinter's preparation traffic what the preparation was for. She understood on day three what was coming and had been watching for it since. On day seven, she found the specific change in the telemetry pattern that indicated the presence of a device attached to the cable exterior that was not part of the cable’s standard infrastructure.

She spent two days confirming the finding before naming it. She named it on day nine at 03:14 AM.

The name was: they already went in.

* * *

The placement pattern had taken seventeen days.

She had suspected this before she confirmed it.

On day six she had looked at the Sri Lanka telemetry data with the specific attention she was giving everything in the feed since day three and had seen: a change in the maintenance output signature at the node-proximal section of the cable, which was a change that was within the normal variance range for a cable in standard operation and that was therefore not an alert in the monitoring system. She had looked at it for forty minutes on