recorded about a man she still had to see, tomorrow, across the same sub-level office where all of this had started. She closed the folder instead, marked it in her memory rather than on any device the Ministry could later search, and made herself return to the files that had brought her here in the first place. It was labeled with a single word: TODAY. Inside was a single audio file, no more than ninety seconds long, timestamped less than a week earlier. Adaeze's hand hovered over it for a long moment before she pressed play, some instinct warning her — the same instinct that had once let her hear a lie forming half a second before it left a suspect's mouth — that whatever was in this file was the reason Segun had died. The recording opened with the particular, unmistakable hush of the Assembly's ceremonial chamber — she recognized the acoustics instantly, having catalogued dozens of official broadcasts recorded in that exact room. A voice she didn't recognize, formal, practiced, began speaking the traditional opening lines of the inauguration oath. And then, layered beneath it, so faint that only someone trained for exactly this kind of listening would ever have isolated it, a second voice — quieter, private, the words meant for no one but the mask itself. "I swear to serve the will of the people," the public voice intoned. "I swear to bury whatever the old mask remembers, whatever the cost," the private voice murmured beneath it, close enough to the microphone that Adaeze could hear the small, wet catch of nervous breath between words, "before anyone learns how to make it speak." Adaeze sat frozen in her chair, the recording still humming faintly from her speakers, and understood with total, bone-deep certainty that whoever had sworn that private oath a week ago already knew about Segun's research. Already knew, in fact, that someone was close to extracting exactly what this file contained. Segun hadn't been killed for what he already knew. He'd been killed because someone believed he was about to make it speak.