Elara came for him in the morning, in uniform, which she never did.
"It's a telemetry review," she said, before he could ask. "On paper. The Verrin deployment threw a reading the Division has never logged, and there's a process for that, and the process is a review. That's the paper version."
She didn't start the car.
"Here's the real version. Somebody requested the review four hours after your sync went to error. Four hours. That's not a process responding to a flag. That's somebody who'd already written the request and was waiting for you to give them a reason to file it."
"Aldric."
"I can't prove the seal." She finally pulled out into the road. "But the petition's at day twenty-six, Caleb. It has four days. And the thing it's been missing, the thing it needs to win, is proof that the recoverable-asset definition reaches a living person, somebody beyond the eleven in the vault."
She let that sit a second.
