She answers the rest of the researcher’s questions on her lunch break, in the stairwell where the signal is bad enough that nobody bothers her.

How long have I had access to what I sent — since I started, technically. Verification touches most of the downstream data eventually. What I did wasn’t accessing something forbidden. It was noticing something nobody told me not to notice, and then going looking for the parts that weren’t handed to me, which is different, and which is probably the part that gets you flagged.

Is there a risk it gets revoked before I can share more — yes. My supervisor has already spoken to me once. If it happens again it won’t be a conversation.

She pauses before the last part, thumb hovering.

I don’t think there’s much more to share, honestly. I gave you what I have. If you need specific records after this I’d have to go looking again, and going looking again is exactly what I’ve been told to stop doing.

Understood, comes the reply, faster than she expects again. For what it’s worth — what you already sent may be enough. I’m meeting with two colleagues next week to talk about how to use it responsibly. That might mean citing it anonymised in something public. It might mean nothing happens for months. I won’t know until I know, and I’ll tell you either way.

Thank you for being careful with me, Mara writes, and means it more than the sentence looks like it means.

She goes back to her desk with eleven minutes left on her break and spends four of them just sitting, not opening her queue, watching the ceiling panels do their slow patient imitation of daylight.

She thinks about what “cited anonymised in something public” actually means — words in a policy journal somewhere, read by people who will never walk the gravel path to a rail yard in Sector 9, who will never watch a man crouch at a row of unopened flowers and decide, quietly, that he owes it to a stranger’s forms to walk into a building he’s spent seven years avoiding.

She thinks: it’s such a small, indirect thing to hope for. And it’s the only thing available.

She opens her queue. Thirty-one items.

She works through them steadily, and does not let herself calculate, again, how many of the closures in front of her are exactly the kind of closure she gave Sector 9 in March — routine, correct by the rules, and only afterward, much afterward, revealed as the first domino in something larger.

She closes twelve before the hour is out. She thinks about all twelve, this time, longer than she used to.