Iria went straight to work.
It wasn't bravery. It was instinct.
When something didn't make sense, when the world stopped aligning the way it should, she went to the place where order was enforced by design. Climate control. Redundancy. Rules layered on top of regulations. The archives were supposed to be immune to chaos.
By the time she reached the building, the encounter at the café felt unreal, like something she'd dreamed and then misplaced. Except for the photo. Except for the bruise on her wrist. Except for the way the man had said *the moon was working hard last night*, as if that were a perfectly reasonable thing to tell a child.
The security scanner beeped as she swiped in. The sound grounded her.
Downstairs, the archival floor hummed softly—servers breathing, lights steady and pale. Iria nodded to Miriam at the front desk, accepted a distracted good morning in return, and made her way to her workstation.
She sat. Logged in. Let her hands move.
Normality, enforced by muscle memory.
For the first ten minutes, nothing was wrong.
Then she noticed the timestamp.
It was subtle. Almost elegant in its wrongness. A municipal report she had personally digitized three months ago showed a discrepancy of twelve minutes between the handwritten original and the metadata attached to its scanned copy.
Twelve minutes meant nothing on its own. Clocks drifted. Systems lagged.
But Iria leaned closer, frowning.
The discrepancy fell between **11:52 p.m. and 12:04 a.m.**
She pulled up the lunar calendar without consciously deciding to.
Full moon.
Her pulse picked up.
She cross-checked the file against its backup. Same discrepancy. She checked the checksum. Clean. No signs of tampering. The system believed this version was correct.
"Okay," she murmured, fingers already flying.
She ran a comparison script across a small batch of records she'd recently worked on. Housing permits. Emergency response logs. Transit reports. Mundane, bureaucratic artifacts of daily life.
The results populated her screen.
Sixteen files showed similar discrepancies.
All within a narrow window.
All during full moons.
Her mouth went dry.
Iria expanded the search parameters, pulling records from other departments, other cities. The system protested mildly, flashing a permissions warning she overrode with a practiced keystroke.
The archive responded.
More discrepancies appeared. Dozens. Hundreds.
None dramatic. No missing buildings. No erased deaths. Just… softened edges. Delayed responses. Slightly altered sequences of events.
As if reality had been nudged. Corrected.
Her skin prickled.
"Someone's editing history," she whispered.
But no—*editing* implied intent. Hands on a keyboard. A conscious choice.
This felt different.
She selected a random record—a traffic accident from five years ago—and pulled the original police report. Then she opened the hospital intake form tied to the same incident.
The times didn't match.
The patient should have bled out before reaching the ER.
But according to the record, they hadn't.
Iria leaned back slowly, heart pounding.
"That's not how time works," she said.
She checked another—a warehouse fire. Structural collapse. Casualties listed as zero.
Cross-referenced media coverage showed confusion, conflicting reports, a brief flurry of speculation—then silence.
She remembered the churned earth near the overgrown lot. The marks made by hands. By knees.
By work.
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard, trembling now.
"What are you doing?" Miriam's voice drifted over from the desk behind her.
Iria startled, nearly knocking over her coffee. She forced a smile and turned. "Just running a consistency check. Something's… off."
Miriam frowned. "Off how?"
"Minor metadata drift," Iria said smoothly. "Probably nothing."
Miriam shrugged, already losing interest. "As long as it doesn't break before lunch."
Iria waited until she was alone again before opening the following file.
This one wasn't municipal.
It was restricted.
She hadn't requested it. The system had suggested it.
Her name appeared in the access log.
She stared at the screen, cold spreading through her chest.
The file header was stark, unadorned.
**PROJECT LYCANTH — INTERNAL REVIEW**
Her cursor hovered.
"This isn't possible," she whispered.
She checked her permissions. Still the same as yesterday. Still nowhere near clearance for anything labeled *project*.
And yet the file opened.
The contents were heavily redacted, black bars swallowing entire paragraphs. But what remained was enough.
Terminology she didn't recognize. References to *operators*. To *cycles*. To *cognitive absence*.
And dates.
Every single one aligned with a full moon.
Iria scrolled.
At the bottom of the page, beneath a section titled **COMPATIBILITY METRICS**, a familiar identifier appeared.
Her employee number.
Her name.
A single line beneath it, unredacted.
"Status: Compatible**
The room felt suddenly too quiet.
Iria closed the file, her hands shaking, and sat very still.
This wasn't just happening to her.
She wasn't losing time randomly. She wasn't sleepwalking into danger or saving children by coincidence.
She was part of something structured. Something monitored.
Something that reached into the world, nudged it when it broke, and left behind just enough evidence for someone like her to notice.
Iria swallowed, her mind racing.
If the records were changing—if reality itself was being adjusted—then the question wasn't *what happened to me last night*.
It was:
**What would have happened if I hadn't been there?**
And worse—
**Who decided I would be?**