She taught me how to read between the footnotes. How to question records, not just record them. Margo never took sides—not publicly, anyway. She’s the kind of woman who believes that history doesn’t care about bias, just truth. It’s part of why I loved her. Part of why I’m scared shitless to call her.
Because if I’m wrong—if she shuts this down—then I’ve already burned the only bridge left between me and the systems that might stop Dennis.
I take a breath. Tap the contact key.
The line buzzes. Once. Twice. Static hums. Then her voice, low and dry like paper turned to ash.
“Kristi?”
I close my eyes. That sound. It drags me back to the archive’s cool, dust-scented silence, to long hours hunched over glowing slates, Margo’s quiet corrections in the background like a second heartbeat.
“Hey,” I say, voice rough. “You got a minute?”
“For you? Always.”
That hurts. She doesn’t know what I’ve done yet.
“I need to show you something,” I say. “And it can’t wait.”
There’s a pause. Then the soft rustle of her turning in her chair, likely shooing someone away. “Is this… archive business?”
“No,” I say. “It’s life or death.”
She doesn’t ask more. Doesn’t stall. A moment later, my screen flickers, and her face appears. Margo looks the same—silver coils piled on top of her head like a crown, deep wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, dark skin lit by the soft glow of interface light.
Her expression shifts the second she sees mine.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
I upload the first file. The requisition logs. The false timestamps. The cargo manifests for the nanovirus shipment buried inside festival imports.
Margo reads fast. Faster than I remember. Her eyes narrow. Her lips press into a line so tight it could slice metal. When she speaks again, her voice is quiet. Controlled.
“Where did you get this?”
“My uncle’s secondary server,” I say. “Encrypted but… not well enough.”
Her brow furrows. “Dennis?”
I nod.
Her gaze lifts from the screen and meets mine. “You know what this is, Kristi.”
“Yeah. I do.”
“This is genocide.”
The word sits between us like a knife.
She doesn’t need me to explain. Doesn’t need a follow-up. She dives back into the files—batch labels, chemical strain descriptors, flagged molecular signatures. She sees it. All of it. The elegance of the virus. The horror in its design.
“You’ve only shown me the logistics,” she says finally. “Do you have origin metadata? Manufacturing sources?”
I swipe another packet into the transfer field. “Three labs. Two offworld. One underground here in Novaria Prime.”
Margo exhales through her nose. “The underground one—it’s hidden inside a compounding facility under the Old District, isn’t it?”
My stomach flips. “You knew?”
