Mara did not reply to the message.
Not immediately.
She stared at the words on the screen, committing them to memory the way she did with Echo anomalies—without emotion, without assumption. Whoever had sent the message knew too much. They knew what she had seen. They knew what she hadn't reported.
They were watching her.
That realization should have frightened her.
Instead, it steadied her.
Mara deleted the message, powered down the console, and sat in silence for several minutes. Then she stood, retrieved the unregistered terminal she hadn't used in years, and brought it online.
If someone was reaching out from the margins of the system, that was where she would find them.
She accessed her private archive again.
This time, she wasn't looking for gaps.
She was looking for patterns.
Dates. Processing signatures. Version histories of Echo preprocessing protocols. The deeper she dug, the clearer it became: the gaps clustered around specific updates. Quiet revisions pushed live without public notice.
Narrative Stabilization.
The phrase appeared again and again.
Mara clenched her jaw.
The dead always tell the truth.
That was the promise.
But promises, she was beginning to realize, could be edited too.