She was at her desk before the second sun cleared the horizon.
This was not unusual. Coreni did her best thinking in the narrow window between the first light and the second, when the city outside her window was still deciding whether to wake up and she could work without the low-grade noise of it pressing against her concentration. She had her caffe, her data screen, and three days before Pell reassigned the only story that had ever genuinely frightened her.
She intended to use all of them.
From the couch, Edi-Veen watched her.
He'd been there when she woke, which meant he'd either not slept or had slept so lightly the distinction didn't matter. He sat with his back straight and his hands resting on his knees and his eyes tracking her the way they tracked everything — not intrusively, not with any quality she could easily object to, just with the calm comprehensive attention of someone for whom awareness was a professional obligation. It had been unsettling for the first hour. Now it was simply a fact of the room, like the hum of the building's climate system or the particular creak the third floorboard made near the kitchen.
She was going to need to think carefully about what that meant.
Later.
"I'm going to be doing this all day," she said, without looking up from the screen. "You don't have to watch."
"I am not watching you. I am watching the room."
"The room hasn't changed since you checked it last night."
"Rooms change."
She glanced at him over the top of her screen. He looked entirely serious, which she was learning was his default state. "Is that Fraluma philosophy or personal experience?"
"Both."
She looked back at her screen. Outside, the second sun broke the skyline and the city's ambient noise ticked upward a degree. She pulled up the public record archive and started with the most basic search she had — Chancellor Migana, cross-referenced against the Fraluma program, filtered by the last decade.
The results were voluminous and almost entirely useless. Press releases. Official statements. Commendations for the Fraluma's service to the government, carefully worded to emphasize loyalty and utility and nothing else. The public record of the Fraluma was a document of everything they were supposed to be and nothing they actually were — a century of managed imagery, clean and consistent and completely empty.
She narrowed the search. Budget allocations. Government contracts. The money was always more honest than the words.
"You're looking for something specific," Edi-Veen said.
"I'm always looking for something specific."
"What is it today?"
"The Chancellor's relationship with the Fraluma program. Financially. Structurally." She pulled a contract summary and scanned it. "How the injections are funded, who authorizes the supply chain, where the research budget goes."
Silence from the couch.
She looked up again. He was very still — stiller than his usual still, which was a meaningful distinction. "That's a thread you recognize," she said.
"There are things I cannot discuss."
"I know. You've mentioned it." She kept her voice neutral, the way she kept her voice neutral in interviews when a subject was about to decide whether to trust her. "I'm not asking you to tell me anything. I'm noting that your face changed when I said injection supply chain, and I'm a journalist, so I notice things like that."
He was quiet for a moment. "You are thorough," he said finally.
"It's the job."
"It is more than the job."
She didn't answer that, because he wasn't wrong and she didn't feel like confirming it. She turned back to the contracts and kept pulling.
By midmorning she had a rough shape of it.
The Fraluma injection program was funded through a government health subsidiary — legitimate on its face, the kind of bureaucratic structure that was designed to be boring enough that no one looked at it twice. But the budget was disproportionate. Significantly disproportionate. The allocation for what was officially classified as a medical maintenance program for a population of several thousand was large enough to fund a small military operation. Which, she was beginning to think, was exactly what it was.
