The archive opened like a wound.
Ethan gave her access at two seventeen in the afternoon — a system authorization that bypassed every security layer she'd spent three weeks trying to circumvent. He did it from his desk in four keystrokes without ceremony, turned his monitor toward her so she could see it was done, and said:
"Take whatever you need."
Then he went back to work.
Aria sat at the secondary terminal in the archive room and began to read.
It took four hours.
The Protocol 7 file in its complete form was not forty-three pages. It was two hundred and seventeen. The fragment she'd recovered from the USB drive had been the surface — the memo, the falsified debt documentation, the approval chain. What lay underneath was something far larger and far older than one acquisition in Q
