The celebration ran late and Dani left it early, which nobody noticed, which was the point of being Dani.
Soren noticed.
He watched her collect her tea and her terminal and slide out of the noise at the exact minute the noise stopped needing a coordinator, and he filed the exit with the half-second of early applause still sitting unexplained in its column.
The room she went to was the monitoring cabin at the edge of the east yard.
Her locks.
Her feeds.
The one space on the continent where every log answered to her and no log watched her back.
◆◆◆◆
What Dani ran there, on her own partition, off every network, was a file she had never named.
Naming a file gave it a search string.
This one lived as an unlabeled block on a drive that officially held seal telemetry, and it opened to a single table she'd been building since the winter, two columns, populated slowly, checked often.
The left column was people.
The right column was mechanisms.
