Bonnie CalderThe crystal pulsed once against the desk and settled into my palm.I should have ignored it. Being the absolute fool that I am, I didn't.I've never been able to say no to Cale. It has something to do with his eyes, I think. Not the color, the way he looks at you when he's already decided what needs doing and is only waiting to see whether you'll keep up. It makes saying no feel like a delay instead of a decision.So I didn't.It hadn't come through any official channel, and I was never one to work through official channels anyway. This had been retrieved the old-fashioned way, through money and connections rather than arcane hacking. Someone had forced it through a narrow line and left it there, expecting I'd understand what that meant. They'd spent more money than sense doing it, given that nearly everyone else connected to this was already dead.I let the interface open without reorganizing it.The name came first.Aurel Mercer.It carried no weight on its own, which was exactly what made it worth attention. People at the center of things rarely look like they belong there the first time you find them.I moved through the rest of the data as it arrived, keeping the fragments in place instead of forcing them into a clean report.Shipping schedules drifting just outside declared routes. Financial transfers splitting across multiple fronts, rejoining under different names, closing clean. Contracts that appeared long enough to move something across a boundary and then vanished before anyone had reason to examine them.The pattern didn't need help forming.He handled movement.I ran the sequence again, slower this time, paying attention to where the system kept working rather than where it appeared to fail.Technica components flagged as routine imports. Personnel entries buried inside auxiliary cargo. Inspection windows bypassed without triggering (...)