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“Most sensible people are terrified of me.”

“She wasn't always sensible.”

“Neither are you.”

For a moment, Kalliopi feels close enough to walk through the door and complain that I have taken too long. The ache arrives without warning, sharp enough that I have to look back at the screen.

Then I see it. Year. Month. Day. Not day, month, year.

I reverse the sequence. A record appears.

“Got you.”

The file is tiny, barely twelve kilobytes, and encrypted differently from everything else. I run the key structure we've derived from generation two.

Rejected.

I alter the sequence. Rejected again.

For the next hour, I get nowhere. I try fragments from the later encryption, then older Crown banking protocols, then combinations based on Kalliopi's notes. Every attempt fails.

Frustration crawls beneath my skin until I push the laptop away.

“Maybe we're wrong.”

Adrianos looks up. “About the generations?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

I blink. “That's very confident for someone who once looked suspicious when I said EBITDA.”

“I didn't know what it meant.”

“You looked like it had personally offended you.”

“Most accounting terms do.”

Despite myself, I laugh. Adrianos closes my laptop.

My amusement disappears. “Have you developed suicidal tendencies?”

“Eat.”

“I'm close.”

“You've been close for hours.”

“That's how difficult problems work.”

He slides a plate toward me. “Food.”

Yesterday, I might have turned this into another fight because Adrianos telling me to eat would have sounded like another order. Today, I recognize the difference between control and care. More importantly, I'm trying not to punish him for listening simply because I'm accustomed to fighting him when he doesn't.

I eat.

Ten minutes later, I reopen the file. And finally see what I have been missing. The Roman numeral isn't the only information in Kalliopi's notation.