The bill arrived twenty minutes after Caleb made it back to the safe house.
He had come down the long road out of the hills with the old man's voice still in his ears and the cold still riding his neck. Iris picked him up at the bottom and drove him back without a word, a silence he was grateful for, and he had just sat down at the table when the comm lit.
[Hacker]: Three senior executives received a packet at oh-nine-forty this morning. I know the time because I watched it arrive and could not stop it.
[Hacker]: The packet documents eleven years of vote manipulation on the VeilWard board, and it names the buyer behind the phantom bids. The buyer is me.
[Hacker]: By tonight the table will know the Hacker is a woman named Kimmely Steward, who has been quietly outbidding five of twelve seats since before your father came back. The cover I have run since you were a child went this morning, about an hour after you walked down a hill.
Caleb read it twice.
