The police sealed Elian’s apartment by noon, but LyraNova had sealed itself faster.

Employees whispered in elevators. Lawyers occupied entire floors. Public relations drafted grief into market-friendly language. By 1:00 p.m., protesters gathered outside, chanting that algorithms could kill without touching a body.

Mara sat in a windowless archive room with Adrian Vale on the opposite side of a steel table. Between them lay Elian’s recovered laptop, two broken drives, a printed access log, and a silence sharp enough to cut paper.

“You should be at the tribunal,” Mara said.

“I postponed my testimony.”

“You can’t postpone a tribunal.”

“I can if I tell them my chief investigator found evidence of internal obstruction.”

“You called me your chief investigator?”

“You prefer ‘the first woman in the room’?”

Mara looked up. Adrian’s attempt at humor was careful, almost gentle. That made it worse.

Six months earlier, when LyraNova’s founder resigned after a procurement scandal, Adrian had been promoted overnight from Chief Product Officer to interim CEO. He had been everywhere since: investor calls, magazine covers, town halls where he promised a more ethical company while wearing expensive sneakers and looking like a man who believed redemption could be scheduled.

Mara had distrusted him on principle. Attractive executives with reform speeches tended to be either naïve or dangerous.

“Did you know Elian personally?” she asked.

“Yes.”

The answer came too quickly.

“How personally?”

Adrian’s jaw tightened. “He was my friend before he became my employee.”

Mara paused over the access log. “That wasn’t in the disclosure file.”

“It wasn’t relevant.”

“A dead witness is relevant to everything.”

Adrian leaned back, the fluorescent light catching the exhaustion around his eyes. “We built Aurora in a rented basement with three servers and more confidence than funding. Elian wrote the first fairness module. When the board forced a commercial launch before audit completion, he fought harder than I did.”

“And then?”

“Then I became management.”

There it was: guilt, clean and old.

Mara turned to the laptop. Elian’s calendar had been wiped, but not expertly. Someone had deleted entries after midnight, after his death. The ghost data revealed one surviving fragment: 11:30 p.m. — MEET WITNESS / EAST LIFT / BRING L.

“Bring L,” Adrian read. “L for laptop?”

“Or a person.”

Mara pulled up the building access records. At 11:02 p.m., an executive card had opened the east lift. The card ID was corrupted, but the camera archive from that hallway had not been deleted. Instead, it had been replaced with a thirty-minute loop of empty corridor.

“That takes skill,” Adrian said.

“Or authorization.”

A knock sounded. Tamsin Reed, Mara’s youngest analyst, entered with a tablet clutched against her chest. She was twenty-four, brilliant, and permanently anxious in the presence of expensive furniture.

“I found something,” Tamsin said. “The access card recovered from Elian’s apartment was cloned. The physical card was a decoy, but the digital signature points to an original owner.”

“Who?” Adrian asked.

Tamsin looked at Mara first. That was answer enough.

Mara took the tablet.

The signature belonged to Adrian Vale.

For a moment, only the air-conditioning spoke.

Adrian stared at the screen. “That’s impossible.”

“Everyone says that before the second piece of evidence,” Mara said, though her voice felt less steady than she wanted.

His expression changed then, not to fear but to something more painful: resignation. He knew how it looked. Former friend dead. Damaging testimony imminent. CEO’s access signature at the scene.

“Mara,” he said quietly, “I didn’t go to Elian’s apartment last night.”

She wanted to believe him, which was exactly why she couldn’t.

Her phone rang. Unknown number.

She answered on speaker.

A distorted voice whispered, “If Vale testifies, he’ll be arrested before sunset. If you keep digging, you’ll join Shore.”

The line went dead.

Tamsin began to cry silently.

Adrian reached for Mara’s phone, but she snatched it away.

“No,” she said. “From now on, no one touches evidence except me.”

His hand hovered, then withdrew.

On the screen, Adrian’s name glowed beside the cloned card signature like a verdict already written.