The Void Left BehindThe winter in Oakhaven had settled into a rhythm of deep, meditative silence, but as the first thaw of early spring began to turn the snow into rivulets of grey slush, the outside world started to seep back in. It didn’t arrive with the clamor of the press or the knock of a process server, but with a series of subtle, unsettling anomalies that only someone as trained as Celeste could detect. It began with the global shipping manifests—not the illicit, shadow-registry manifests they had once controlled, but the legitimate, public-facing data streams that tracked the pulse of international commerce.Celeste sat at her desk, the notebook from her own life pushed aside in favor of a tablet she had long ago stripped of all tracking software. She was monitoring the flow of steel, medical supplies, and high-tech components through the Mediterranean and the South China Sea. She had expect
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