She writes back to the researcher on Monday, from a public terminal at the library annex near Meridian Street rather than from her own account, which feels absurd and necessary in equal measure.

I’m willing to talk. I’d rather not use my name yet — not because I don’t trust you, but because I don’t fully know what I’m risking and I’d like to find that out slowly if I can.

I work inside the system the document is about. That’s how I have what I have. I’m not a whistleblower in the way you might be picturing — I didn’t uncover a conspiracy. I found a gap between what the model says it does and what actually happens to people, and I couldn’t stop looking at it once I’d started.

Ask me what you need to ask.

The reply comes faster than she expects, within the hour, which she reads as either encouraging or alarming and cannot decide which.

Understood, and thank you — that’s a reasonable position. Some questions, when you’re ready, no rush:

How long have you had access to the data you referenced? Is there a risk that access will be revoked before you can share more, if there’s more to share? And — this one is not about the document — are you safe? I ask because people who send me things like this are not always thinking about themselves when they do it.

She sits with that last question longer than the others.

Are you safe.

Nobody at Meridian Street has asked her that, not really, not in those words. Petra’s warning came closest, and even that was really a question about the model’s metrics, dressed as concern for her.

She writes back only the answer to the last question, and leaves the others for tomorrow.

I don’t know yet. I think that’s an honest answer.

She logs out, deletes the browser history on the terminal out of a habit she didn’t have two months ago, and walks the four blocks back toward the tram in the flat evening light, thinking about the shape of the word safe — how it used to mean something simple, a condition you were either in or out of, and how it has become, this spring, something more like weather: present, changing, never entirely under anyone’s control, including her own.

She gets home before Celia. She writes the exchange into her notebook, word for word, because she has started to believe that some things need to exist somewhere the system cannot touch, even if that somewhere is just paper and her own uncertain hand.