#Chapter 34: The Shape of a Lie

By midmorning, Emma and Nathan called me into a private debrief in a side conference room. The moment I stepped in, I knew it wasn’t a casual meeting. Nathan’s jaw was tight. Emma was already mid-sentence about procedural integrity. “We’ve had more incidents,” Emma said. “Internal files accessed remotely. Notes moved. A proposal flagged as ‘reviewed’ that no one on our team touched.” I sat straighter. “Are we thinking inside leak?” Nathan didn’t nod, but his face was confirmation enough. “We’re not ruling anything out,” he said. “But until we isolate the breach, we need tighter protocol. No unencrypted uploads. No unsupervised archive access.” Emma’s eyes flicked toward me. “That includes you, by the way.” I nodded. “Understood.” Then, as the conversation shifted to general patching procedures, I turned it. “Has anyone re-evaluated the old chain-of-command files? The military records from Sector Delta?” Nathan raised a brow. “Why?” “There’s language in some of the o