She knelt and popped the access panel.
And stared.
“What the fuc—fudge?”
Raaze appeared at her shoulder, his bulk blocking the light. “Problem?”
“No. The problem is there is no problem.” She gestured at the mechanism with her probe. “This is… this is nothing. Basic tumbler lock, no encryption layer, no failsafe. I could open this with a hairpin and a prayer.”
She’d expected this to be harder. Layered security, with escalating difficulty. That was how it worked. You didn’t put your best lock on the outside and leave the inner door held shut with wishful thinking.
Raaze shrugged, the movement easy despite the tension in the corridor behind them. “Why would they bother?”
“What do you mean? Why would they bother? This is the Healers’ Hall archive. Patient records, medical research, probably half the genetic data in the sector?—”
“Which is protected by the guards.” He ticked points off on his fingers. “The checkpoints. The encrypted outer door you just cracked. The fact that this entire facility is on a separate network that can’t be accessed remotely.” He nodded toward the lock. “That’s not security. That’s box ticking because this door needed a lock.”
“That’s idiotic.”
His mouth curved, not quite a smile. “No one expected anyone to get this far. So why waste resources on a lock no one would ever reach?”
She wanted to argue. It offended her engineer’s soul, the idea that security could be this… lazy.
Four minutes, Fred reminded her.
Right. Complain about shoddy security practices later.
The lock gave up its secrets in under thirty seconds. The door slid open with a soft hiss, revealing the records room beyond.
“Through,” she said.
Inside, the inner sanctum of the archive was a tomb of humming servers and dim blue light. She didn’t waste time, sliding into the seat behind the primary interface and her fingers flying across the keys. This was her element. It wasn’t about fighting or sneaking; it was about patterns. Her language. Not his.
She pulled up the search function and typed in Raaze’s medical ID. The file loaded in seconds… the original diagnosis, the supporting documentation, and the chain of custody for every piece of evidence used to exile him.
Oh my god, it was sloppy. So sloppy it made her teeth ache.
“The timestamps don’t match.” She pointed at the screen. “This diagnostic says it was run at 0340 local time, but the equipment log shows the scanner wasn’t powered on until 0415. And this signature—” she tapped the authorization field. “—shouldn’t be here. V’Teth signed off on the final diagnosis, but there’s a secondary approval from someone. From what I can see…” She ran another query. “Yeah, that’s not standard protocol for a Blood Rage certification.”
Raaze’s jaw tightened. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.
“The chain of custody is wrong, too. According to this protocol, your samples should have gone from collection to analysis to archive. Two hands. Instead, they passed through three, and the middle entry doesn’t have a name attached. Just a department code.”
He leaned in to look at the screen. “Was it falsified? Does this prove that?”
She shook her head. “I can prove it doesn’t follow procedure. Whether that’s enough to overturn the diagnosis…” she shrugged. “That would depend on who reviews it.”
She should stop there. She had what they came for. But sloppy people were sloppy more than once, and the pattern-recognition part of her brain was already itching.
She began pulling adjacent files, searching for other high-ranking players who’d been removed from the league around the same time.
The results populated, and name after name scrolled up the screen. Eight files. All processed through V’Teth’s office in the eighteen months before his death.
She opened the first one. It had the same mismatched timestamps and the same phantom department signature. She opened a second file, then a third file…
“They’re all the same,” she murmured.
Raaze stiffened beside her, and she glanced up. His jaw was tight, a muscle jumping in his cheek.
