The door closed behind Michael and the room did not feel empty. It felt full of something Dayo could not name, a pressure behind the air that made his shoulders tight. He walked to his desk and sat down. The leather chair creaked. He opened the laptop he kept in the bottom drawer, the one that never left this room, the one with no cloud connection and no backup.
The screen woke. Dayo opened a folder labeled with a string of numbers that meant nothing to anyone but him. Inside were the fragments. The real fragments, not the fiction he had sold Michael three hours ago.
Bella's tap on Michael's phone had delivered four names. Silas Vane. Graham. Isobel. Leonard. Some routing codes. A mention of a Geneva compound. Shell companies with names like medical charities. That was the entire inventory. It was enough to know they existed and that they moved together. It was not enough to destroy them. It was not enough to stop them.
