Page 19 of Pocket Wife

Lucy doesn’t look pleased. She looks ready. As if she’s been waiting for me to stop defending a door already cracked open.

She reaches for Amadine’s letter and sets it beside the central record. “Then we keep matching every story to every date until the lies start showing their seams.”

“We?”

“You need someone who can read Solaris shorthand. I need someone whose official seal makes corporate men sweat.” She lifts one shoulder. “Seems efficient.”

That should not amuse me.

It does.

I open a new evidence matrix and add her witness list beside the archive discrepancies. Local testimony. Family records. Regional filings. Central metadata. Four columns that should support one another.

Instead, they’ve begun to accuse.

Outside, near the high windows, a faint mechanical whine passes and fades.

Lucy hears it too this time.

Another drone.

I log the sound, mark the time, and keep working.

By dawn, I’ve identified seven altered entries, three impossible parcel references, and one sealed packet that no preservation specialist below tribunal rank can open.

I also understand something I’ve avoided naming.

Helix’s claim is no longer merely uncertain.

It’s beginning to look manufactured.

CHAPTER 9

LUCY

The seventh altered record has a child’s thumbprint on it.

I notice the smudge before Rethan does. It sits near the edge of an old water-tax receipt, small and dark where some long-dead clerk’s son or daughter must have grabbed the page before the ink dried. A stupid detail. A human detail. One no corporate archive would bother to invent.

The receipt lists the Kest field as active farmland.

The regional transfer file calls the same field dormant reserve land.

Both carry the same year.

I stare until the numbers blur. “This is enough.”

Rethan doesn’t lift his eyes from the projection matrix. “It is significant.”

“Enough,” I repeat.

He adjusts the receipt beneath the scanner. “Enough to justify continued investigation. Not enough to present an accusation publicly.”

A humorless laugh escapes me. I’ve slept less than an hour, my back hurts from leaning over tables, and half the valley is waiting outside the cooperative hall for news I can barely hold in my own hands.

“Not enough?” I say. “We have altered entries, impossible parcel numbers, missing archive years, witness letters, tax records, and now a receipt proving a field they called empty was feeding people.”

“That proves contradiction.”