He falls silent.
I force myself to breathe, slow and deliberate, until my pulse stops hammering like a fist against a door.
“Who authorized maintenance at 02:47?” I ask, quieter now, because quieter questions sometimes get answers.
He hesitates, then shakes his head. “That’s not… that’s above my pay grade.”
“Then whose pay grade is it?” I press.
His mouth tightens. “I can’t.”
I stare at him for a long beat, then nod once, because I understand the shape of fear in his posture. He is not the one who killed the file. He is just another civilian pressed against institutional machinery.
“Fine,” I say, voice flat. “Thank you.”
He retreats quickly, relief radiating off him like heat.
When he’s gone, I turn back to the console.
The projection still displays the corruption flag, bright red, arrogant.
I open the vault audit trail again and focus on the maintenance override entry.
Unlogged.
Which means someone with authority removed the log.
Which means deliberate tampering.
My fingers move fast now, not frantic, but precise, pulling every accessible record: time stamps, maintenance scheduling notices, system health diagnostics. The vault’s own monitoring data shows a brief spike in access permissions at 02:47, thena sudden normalization, like a heartbeat skipping and then pretending nothing happened.
I sit back slowly, cold spreading through me like ink.
They didn’t just delete evidence.
They reached into the record and broke it, then tried to pass the break off as entropy.
My compad vibrates again—another media alert, another senator talking about neutrality, another pundit calling me unstable.
I don’t even look.
Instead, I open my internal memo interface and begin typing, hands steady despite the fury that wants to shake them apart.
Subject: Irregular Vault Access / Evidence File Corruption — Kirell Recalibration Secondary Confirmation.
Details: Retrieval approved; file flagged corrupted following unlogged overnight maintenance window; audit trail indicates deliberate tampering. Request immediate inquiry.
I attach the audit log excerpt, the timestamp, the maintenance override anomaly.
Then I hesitate, fingers hovering over the send command.
Because sending this means escalation.
Escalation means attention.
Attention means danger.
But silence is how files die.
