The contractor review had been stalling for eleven days, trapped in a bureaucratic loop. Hunter wasn’t an impatient man—he’d spent eleven grueling months at Vantage Industrial, repeating the same four tasks daily—but he knew how federal processes worked. When an oversight body ran inside a system it was supposed to be investigating, it rarely reached anything structural. It would just confirm the bare minimum and close the file.
Renna, back at her desk but under close watch, had confirmed his fears: the oversight parameters were too narrow to reach the hybrid entity looming above Acker.
Then, everything changed. A Tuesday morning message from Adaeze: “Her name is Sable Ofosu. She’s been building a parallel case file on the corporate group above Vantage for two years. She’s real, she’s ca
