I try to click the code identifier. I need to know what 31C-Alpha is. I need to know why the military is funding a sanitation upgrade in a civilian restaurant district.
I click.
The screen cuts to black.
Then red.
Authorization denied. Login flagged for administrative review. Unauthorized activity has been logged.
A high-pitched whine builds in my ears.
My hands start shaking. This isn’t some procedural note. This is a lockout. A warning. My own system credentials—credentials I’ve had since I was sixteen, built around the trust my father left me—are gone. Scrubbed.
I sit there with my fingers hovering over the keys, chest so tight I can’t breathe in fully.
They locked me out.
The second I touched that budget line, the system slammed the door on my fingers.
This wasn’t just politics. This wasn’t just gentrification or bigotry wrapped in zoning laws.
This was a trap.
I pull back from the desk, heart pounding.
“Okay,” I whisper. “Okay. Think.”
I try to open a side archive database. No luck. My clearance has been retroactively altered. That alone is illegal. Someone’s scared enough to bury a legal trail deep enough to take careers with it.
My uncle’s amendments.
His insistence that I push the measure through quickly.
His offhand comments about being “battle ready.”
And now, military funding hidden in sewer repairs.
I don’t know what they’re building. Or hiding. But I played my part in it.
Me. The good little analyst. The one who thought she could do damage control by reading the fine print and asking the right questions. I didn’t read deep enough. Didn’t ask loud enough.
“I helped them strip people’s lives for… something,” I whisper.
I don’t know what yet. But the silence from the terminal screams that it’s worse than I imagined.
I stand up and rake my nails through my hair, pulling until it hurts. A sharp smell of ozone and burned circuits hits my nose—the archive system automatically purging my session.
It’s too quiet in here.
I throw my coat on the couch.
No. Not the coat.
The coat reminds me of the nights I wore it to see him. Of stepping into that restaurant like I belonged. Of sitting across from him and pretending I understood what the stakes were.
I grab my bag. My data chip kit. An old, faded hoodie with paint on the sleeve—my father’s.
I need to get out. I need to see the files. The real files. Not the digitized, scrubbed versions Dennis lets the public see.
