Her supervisor asks her to step into the small room on Thursday morning.

It is not an interrogation room. It is a meeting room with a round table and a plant The Accord’s facilities team waters on a schedule, and that is somehow worse — the ordinariness of it, the way it insists that nothing unusual is happening here.

“How are you,” he says, once they’re both sitting.

“Fine.”

“Your queue times are up. Not badly. Twelve percent over baseline this month.” He has a tablet he isn’t looking at. “That’s not why I asked you in.”

She waits.

“There’s an access log,” he says. “Compliance database, Strategic Planning files, public documentation portals. Your account’s been active in places outside your division’s normal scope. Several times, over several weeks.”

“I was trying to understand a case I’d worked.”

“Which case?”

She could lie. She is bad at lying — everyone who knows her says so, and it has always been true, a small mercy she has never decided whether to be grateful for. “Sector 9. The environmental flag I closed in March.”

He nods slowly, as if this confirms something he’d hoped it wouldn’t. “That flag is closed. Has been closed for weeks.”

“I wanted to understand the full picture.”

“There isn’t a full picture that’s yours to have.” He says it without heat. He has never once, in two years, raised his voice at her, and she understands now that this is not kindness so much as method — the same careful, load-bearing calm that runs through everything the Accord does, all the way up. “I’m not writing you up. I’m telling you, as someone who has to write the review that decides whether you get flagged for review yourself: stop.”

“Why does it matter what I look at? I’m not changing anything. I’m not stopping anything.”

“It matters,” he says, “because curiosity is a variable. It gets modelled like anything else.” He finally looks at his tablet, then sets it down, screen dark. “I don’t know what you think you’re going to find, Mara. But whatever it is, you finding it changes nothing about what happens to that sector. It only changes what happens to you.”

She thinks of the document already sent, already sitting somewhere outside every system he’s describing, and says nothing.

“Are we understood?” he asks.

“We’re understood,” she says, which is true, though not in the way he means it.

He nods, satisfied, and stands first — a small kindness, letting her leave the room after him rather than the other way around.

She sits a moment longer than she needs to.

Then she goes back to her desk and opens her queue.