The day fractured before noon.
Marisol went live with what we’d given her — hashed chains, server traces, a tidy packet of leads that would make any decent reporter salivate. Her anchor voice was steady and sharp; the newsroom’s servers hummed like a hive. Across the county the first ripple hit: donors called their handlers, phones pinged with panic, and the Carter mansion’s gilded rooms felt suddenly very, very small.
At the same moment, something meant to splinter us hit hard and precise: a doctored packet, polished and poisonous, leaked to a private feed. The headline it carried was surgical: Alleged Carter Collusion — Internal Documents Suggest Direct Transfer to Private Accounts. It flashed across screens in a neat, kill-or-be-killed instant.
James staggered when the notification r
