Orin paused, looking up at me over his glasses. “How old?”
“Twenty years. Look up the name ‘Purge Cases’ from two decades back. See if anything sounds familiar.”
Dane leaned in, his bulk blocking the line of sight from the main corridor. “We think it’s a revival. Or a continuation.”
Orin’s expression shifted from annoyed tech-support to intrigued hacker. “Two decades… that’s the digitisation transition era. The archives are a mess. Half the files from that period were corrupted during the upload.”
“Can you find it?”
“If it exists,” Orin said, a challenge sparking in his eyes, “I’ll find it. But if Morrow has his hooks in it, it’ll be deep.”
“Dig,” I said. “Please.”
He exhaled hard, cracking his knuckles. “All right. I’ll run a pattern search on the sigil geometry against the cold case database. Give me an hour.”
“We don’t have an hour,” Dane said. “We have ten minutes before Morrow files the official jurisdiction transfer and locks us out of the case entirely.”
“Then I better type fast,” Orin said, spinning back to his screens.
“I think someone is replicating something,” I said, turning back to Marcus. “And Darian Morrow doesn’t want us anywhere near it.”
Marcus exhaled slowly, his brows furrowed. “What do you need?”
“Authorisation to access the shard data,” I answered. “Orin hasthe packet Mira uploaded. If we can examine the physical make-up of the fragment before ACD walls it off completely…”
“We may find what they don’t want us to see,” Dane finished.
Marcus nodded once. “All right. I’ll approve your request under a ‘Secondary Procedural Review’. It’s an old regulatory loophole—technically, until the ACD files their final audit, local oversight retains emergency access for ‘verifying chain of custody.’ It’s thin, but it buys you twenty-four hours before the file locks.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“But listen to me—you stay inside official channels.” His eyes were hard. “If Morrow escalates?”
Dane’s jaw set. “We’ll be careful, sir. We’re looking for a trail, not a confrontation.”
Marcus’s mouth twitched. “Good. Get back to work.” He turned and marched back to his office.
“I found it,”Orin shouted from his chair. “The cold case Faye mentioned. It was buried under three layers of encryption.”
“And?” I asked, stepping closer to the screen, Dane’s bulk solid at my back.
“One victim found in an alley off the High Street. The report is… sparse. Most of the data is corrupted. No mention of syphoned power, no magical readings logged.” He glanced at his tablet. “But the photos survived. The sigil is there. It’s the same brand, Selene. Identical geometry.”
“Who ran the investigation?” Dane asked.
Orin shook his head. “That’s the other thing. The signature block? It’s gone. Wiped clean. Whoever worked that case… someone wanted to make sure their name wasn’t attached to it anymore.”
“Wiped how?” I asked. “Redacted?”
“Deleted,” Orin corrected. “But they were sloppy with themetadata. They scrubbed the officer’s name, but they left the Unit Citation code.”
He turned the tablet screen towards me.
MCIU-Taskforce-4.
The blood drained from my face. The noise of the station faded.
“Taskforce 4,” I whispered. The memory finally clicked.
