Derek Hayes dropped the folder on my desk like it was a dead animal.
It landed with a heavy slap, scattering my sticky notes and knocking over the coffee cup I had been nursing since dawn. Cold black liquid seeped across the wood, but neither of us moved to stop it.
"Legacy bug from the V2 migration," he said. His beard was a dark thicket that hid most of his expression, but his eyes—sharp, gray, and deeply unimpressed—were impossible to miss. "Eighteen months old. Three engineers have tried to patch it. All failed."
I wiped the coffee with the edge of my sleeve and opened the folder. The code printout was dense, arcane, written in an early version of Stellar's proprietary framework. It was the coding equivalent of archaeological excavation—layers of sediment, half-erased comments, and
