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“Have you seen Sera’n?”

Merik’s expression changed.

It was subtle.

Apparently everybody around me had developed an irritating new habit of doing that.

“He is not here.”

“I gathered that.”

Merik shifted the specimen container.

“Was he called somewhere?”

“I do not know.”

That could have been true.

It could also have been the answer someone gave when they’d been told not to answer.

Yesterday, I might not have noticed the difference.

Today, everything felt like evidence.

I set my bag beneath my workstation and activated the terminal.

My regular specimen queue loaded without issue.

So Sera’n had done exactly what I thought.

He hadn’t removed me from the laboratory.

He had only cut off the archive permissions that would let me continue digging.

Historical records remained unavailable.

Compatibility archives remained unavailable.

My ordinary work files sat there innocently, waiting for me to pretend nothing had happened.

I tried.

For nearly fifteen minutes.

I logged samples from the overnight processing cycle, checked three tissue-storage temperatures, and corrected a mislabeled tray before I realized I had entered the same accession number twice.

I stared at the error.

That never happened.

Not to me.

“Damn it.”

Merik glanced up.

I erased the duplicate and forced myself to concentrate. Numbers were honest—or they had been easier to believe yesterday. Now every identifier made me wonder whether I was looking at the original record or whatever version someone wanted me to see. I looked toward Sera’n’s station again. Still empty. His workstation had not gone into idle lock, and that caught my attention, because Sera’n always locked his terminal when he left the lab. Always. He was obsessive about it—not paranoid, precise, a distinction he had once explained to me at length. I had watched him walk halfway back across the laboratory once because he realized he had left a secondary panel unlocked.