Sabotage never announced itself.
It misaligned.
The first disruption didn't look like disruption.
A minor delay in documentation routing. A report that should have circulated at nine arrived at eleven.
No error message.
No explanation.
Just drift.
"They're testing friction," Adrian said quietly.
"Yes," I replied. "And friction hides inside normalcy."
Normalcy was camouflage.
I didn't escalate.
Escalation signaled insecurity.
Instead, I traced the flow.
Routing logs.
Timestamp patterns.
Authority touchpoints.
Nothing overt.
But something subtle had shifted.
"Latency increased by twelve percent," Adrian noted, scanning the dashboard.
"Only in one cluster," I replied.
Cluster.
Not department.
Not person.
Pattern.
Sabotage didn't break structure.
It strained timing.
By late morning, a second anomaly surfaced.
An approval request was redirected unnecessarily.
Not rejected.
Re-routed.
Twice.
"They're complicating velocity," Adrian said.
