She read the files for three days. Not consecutively — she had shifts to work, calibrations to run, the ordinary

They went down at the third hour of night. Not together — Soren had been specific about that, with the

There was a man named Dekhar who had died in the archive three years ago. Not violently. Not dramatically. He

She didn’t sleep. Not because sleep wouldn’t come — exhaustion had a way of overriding even the sharpest grief, and