Chal looked anxious. I wasn’t sure why he was but just the fact that he looked worried was enough to set me on edge. He picked up a screen and flicked through it briefly before putting it down again. I wasn’t sure if it was a nervous tic or if he was trying to find something but I almost wanted to scream at him to hurry up and tell me.

“The first thing is about Peggy,” he started, picking up the screen again.

My heart clenched and I found myself leaning forwards to get a glimpse of the screen.

“Is she alright?” I asked as fear started to nuzzle deeper into my heart.

“Yes, she’s… well, not fine, but she’s getting there.”

I watched him carefully, waiting for him to clarify what he meant.

It could be anything really. She’d been working closely with therapists, physiotherapists, doctors and even more. Any of them could have said something to Chal to make him look so worried.

“It’s about her mods,” he said finally. “I thought you’d want to know.”

A tiny bit of relief washed through me.

“Okay,” I said carefully.

Maybe she’d finally spoken to him about getting her mods put back in or maybe he’d found that she still had some left that the Council hadn’t found.

“I’ve been going over it again and again and I just don’t know how the Council found them,” he said, running one hand through his hair. “They’re untraceable, they always have been. She didn’t have a single scar to indicate that she’d had any implanted and there was no other way that the Council could have detected them.”

A sinking feeling started in my stomach but my brain took a little longer to catch up and work out why I was feeling so bad.

“Oh,” I said when I finally realised. “It was my fault, wasn’t it?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t even meet my eyes as he scanned the screen before him.

“I wrote about them in the story, didn’t I?” My stomach turned nauseatingly and I stared down at my clenched hands. “Is it my fault they knew about them?”

I couldn’t look at him.

I just couldn’t believe how dumb I’d been. I never should have written about our mods, that was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done and that’s really saying something. I should have been more careful.

There was always the risk that the Council would capture us and if I hadn’t been such an idiot, there’s a chance that they wouldn’t have known and then we’d have been able to communicate with Peggy the whole time. Or, we could have spoken to her and found a way to get her out much earlier.

It was my fault she’d suffered so much.

“I don’t think so,” Chal said carefully.

I barely dared to peek up at him, scared that he’d see the self-hatred in my eyes.

“How else did they find out?” I asked, hopelessness and guilt starting to rise within me.

“Well, I’ve been combing your story to find out. At first, I thought that it might have been a problem with the mods and that they were giving off some kind of signal that the Council were able to trace but I still have some of the same models that you and your crew have. They were completely untraceable. I went through the Council records that we recovered and there’s nothing that mentions them at all. Or, at least, there wasn’t at first.”

He paused, reading something on the screen.

“But you found something?” I prompted when he still didn’t speak.

“Yes, sorry. I found some recordings. It seems that the Council infiltrated the base long before Andy even knew about it. He had some building work carried out on the heating system not long before your mission, do you remember that?”

I nodded.

The heating and cooling systems in certain areas of the base were famously bad. The garage was always freezing, some of the dorms were always too hot and a couple more of the rooms in the old building were dodgy too.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I spoke to him about it,” Chal said, his lips pursing slightly. “He’d wanted to use the engineers on the base to fix it but the Council had insisted that they send some engineers instead. Apparently, it was standard protocol and Andy didn’t think anything more of it.”

I licked my lips slowly as my brain worked furiously.

“The rooms they fixed… It was the canteen, right? Some of the dorms, the garage… where else?”

It was all the places we’d found listening devices. I’d always wondered a little bit when they’d managed to fit them but I’d never even considered that it could have happened before our mission.

“The small kitchen in the canteen, the tutor’s bedrooms and your dorm. Specifically,” Chal said darkly.

I swallowed.

Some of those placements, as horrific and invasive as they were, made sense. Like the tutors' bedrooms, that made sense to me, but why the canteen and why our dorm. Before the mission, we hadn’t done anything wrong.

“Why?” I managed to say around the lump of anxiety in my throat. “Why us?”

Chal tilted his head sympathetically.

“From the paperwork, it seems like a random decision. The Council were suspicious of the base for a long time, especially with how much Andy had pulled away from their teachings and employed his own staff instead of going through the Council for recruitment but… It was Harvey who signed off the paperwork to place the listening devices.”

My heart froze for a second before it began racing.

I had so many questions racing through my head that I didn’t even know where to start.

I wanted to ask why. Why had Harvey done that to us? Why did he target us even back then? Was it just his hatred of Cas or did he know about Peggy using the back channels and how much we frequented illegal forums?

Or about our fake IDs? Or that we’d hacked Frida so that we could get mods, or go to bars whilst underage… And visit party planets and ships. Or any of the other many illegal things I was just now realising we’d done.

When it was laid out like that, it looked bad but we hadn’t done any of that with malicious intent! Most of it was just for fun or so that Peggy could get information that the Council refused to teach us about! It wasn’t necessary to try and bring down the Council then, it just ended up that way.

“From what I can gather, they had audio recordings of the five of you talking about your mods which tipped them off. From there, they knew enough to put her in an isolation cage as soon as they took her so that she couldn’t send any messages out if she woke up before they expected her to and then they operated as soon as they got her to the base,” Chal said, his disgust barely concealed.

“Did they… did they find all her mods?” I asked.

Chal nodded silently.

I ducked my head as I tried to swallow down my nausea. I hated the idea of anyone operating on her without her consent. It made me want to kill Harvey because I knew he’d been the one who ordered the operations.

Hatred roiled within me but I forced it down. I couldn’t deal with it right now, it would tear me apart.

“So, it wasn’t just my fault that they found out about the mods?” I made myself ask, needing to hear him say it.

“It wasn’t your fault at all. Someone mentioned the mods when you were in the kitchen or your dorm and they knew from there. Even if you’d never written about it in the book, they still would have searched her,” Chal explained gently.

I nodded. His words had soothed me slightly but the anger and hatred still remained.

“There was something else I wanted to talk to you about,” he said hesitantly.

His uncertain tone worried me and immediately, I thought of Andy. It had to be something to do with their fight, I knew it.

I felt myself sit up straighter, wanting to know more.

“I’m not sure how to say this,” he started. “But I wanted to know if you were happy here?”

My face scrunched up in confusion.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He smiled at me softly.

“It’s a simple question, Aries. Are you happy here? Are you enjoying living on Freo?”

It wasn’t that simple. It wasn’t a yes or no answer.

Things on Freo were fine, not that bad. I could live with my crew and still do something to help other people. It was better than how things were on the base, I knew that much for sure.

“I guess so,” I said finally.

Chal’s eyes darted towards the door and back before he spoke again.

“What if you had another option? What if you and your crew could leave?”