At 14:12 the Level Seven alarm flashed red over the catalogue desk. Beneath it, the suppression indicator stayed green. Daran was putting away a tray of paper slips when Eliza crossed the room. She asked him for the pressure reading; he had none. The trustee-era provenance rooms were above them, and somewhere between the alarm and the water line an instruction had failed.
“Which loop?”
“Seven east.”
“Water?”
“No pressure confirmation.”
“Gas?”
“No discharge.”
“Local?”
“Unknown.”
The archive had three ways to kill a fire before it spread. All three depended on different hardware. Eliza refused to believe three failures until somebody showed her three failures. She took the stairs. Daran followed.
Smoke caught in their throats one level below the alarm. Eliza checked the stairwell door with the back of her hand before she opened it. A clerk coming down from Seven had blood on one hand and a box against his chest.
“East room,” he said.
“What happened?”
“Alarm. Lights. Then heat.”
“Did the suppression discharge?”
“I didn't hear it.”
“What is in the box?”
He looked down as though surprised to find it there.
“Trustee migration ledgers.”
Eliza took the box from him.
“Leave.”
He did.
Daran said, “We should also leave.”
“Soon.”
Level Seven's east corridor was already grey. The emergency shutters had dropped across two doors and remained open across three others. Another impossible combination. Eliza stayed low. A sprinkler head above the first room was dry.
The glass bulb had broken. No water came. Daran pointed at the wall valve.
“Manual shut?”
“Maybe. Tell the fire crew where it is.”
“Can we open it?”
“Not with people still in the stair. We have to get the west rooms clear.”
A door farther down the corridor folded inward under the heat. Heat rolled through the opening. Eliza moved backwards.
The room beyond held provenance bundles that traced the conversion of trustee estate authority into city services. Paper burned differently from cable insulation. Eliza knew the smell.
She hated that she knew it. Someone shouted from the stairwell.
“Evacuate Seven!”
Daran grabbed her sleeve.
“There are two staff in west processing.”
“They have another stair.”
“If it is open.”
Eliza turned. The west corridor was still clear. They ran. The first processing room was empty. In the second processing room Pera Sol crouched under a table, unplugging a recorder. Eliza stopped.
“What are you doing?”
“Saving the local capture.”
“The building is on fire.”
“I noticed.”
“Leave it.”
Pera looked offended. The recorder was already free. She picked it up.
“Done.”
Daran pointed towards the stairs.
“Please argue outside.”
They reached the west stair as the main lights failed. They had rehearsed the evacuation for flood, fire and bomb threats. Staff knew the stairs and the muster points; nobody had been assigned a box to rescue. Even so, assistants came into the landing with crates against their chests. A system that was meant to keep paper dry and compartmentalised had left them judging which bundles were worth another flight of stairs.
Eliza saw an assistant with the Schedule Nine comparison films.
“Put them down.”
He stared at her.
“Put them down.”
“They're the originals.”
“They're not.”
He hesitated.
“The public copy—”
“Exists in seventeen places I can name without breathing. Leave.”
He left the box. Eliza waited until she heard him reach the next landing. At the fifth-floor landing, smoke entered the stair from below. Wrong direction.
The fire was travelling through cable channels. Somebody had opened the lower stair door. A voice shouted that the east stair was blocked. The crowd slowed. Eliza felt panic begin in the bodies around her before anyone screamed.
Pera raised the recorder over her head.
“West exit is open. Keep moving.”
Nobody had authorised her to say it. The sentence was true. People moved. At Level Three, two archivists tried to go back for the accession room. Eliza blocked them.
“The room is replicated.”
“The seals aren't.”
“The seal register is.”
“The physical specimens—”
“Can burn.”
One of them looked at her as though she had struck him. Eliza heard herself. She hated the sentence. She said it again.
“They can burn.”
The stair kept moving. Outside, the archive windows reflected orange before flames became visible. Nara arrived while the last staff were being counted. She had come from the square with twenty people carrying blankets, water and nothing resembling authority.
“What do you need?”
Eliza looked at the building.
“Names.”
Nara misunderstood.
“Of the people inside?”
“Everyone who was working. Everyone who got out. Everyone anyone saw leave.”
Pera already had the staff list. Nara took it to the volunteers. A second list began on the pavement. Not missing records. Missing people.
Arun arrived six minutes later with Sela and two fire-service engineers from the Spine. He did not enter the building. That was the first thing Eliza noticed. He stood with the fire crews at the suppression panel outside and asked them what still responded. Rook's first aircraft crossed overhead at 14:39, high enough to keep clear of the smoke. Korr had sent it to photograph roof heat and smoke spread because the city fire map had become unreliable. Marian arrived on foot. Ansel arrived in a car and was furious that Marian had not waited.
“What can the estate offices hold?” Eliza asked.
Marian did not ask why.
“How much?”
“Everything that survives tonight.”
“I have five empty floors within walking distance.”
“Dry?”
“Yes.”
“Secure?”
“Secure is becoming a word I distrust.”
Eliza looked at her.
“Good answer.”
Marian called for keys. At 14:51 the seventh-floor windows failed. Glass fell inward first. Then outward. The fire crews withdrew from the east side.
Eliza stood behind the line with Daran. He had ash on his face.
“You told us the archive was distributed.”
“Yes.”
“You said the building did not matter.”
“I said no record should depend on one building.”
“That is not the same.”
“No.”
He looked at the orange windows.
“Good.”
She understood the accusation. Behind the orange windows lay the margin marks on the migration ledgers and the binding that held their loose enclosures in order. The scans would let a reader inspect the wording. They would not show where a clerk had pushed a pencil point through the paper. Eliza tried to remember whether anyone had photographed the folio before the alarms.
The east roof vent opened. A column of smoke rose straight up. Pera stood beside her with the rescued recorder.
“It caught the first alarm.”
“Complete?”
“Until I unplugged it.”
“Timestamped?”
“Yes.”
“Copy it.”
“Here?”
“Everywhere.”
At sixteen hundred, Daran spread a city map over a desk in Marian's empty office. The central node was dark. He used paper pins for the copies people had reported: district libraries, schools, a depot beyond London, a private holder near the river. Every pin required a telephone call to check what the holder actually possessed.
The square sent volunteers with district holdings lists. The Spine sent storage units and checksums. Marian opened two former estate offices, then a third when the first rooms filled with evacuated staff rather than records. Rook sent a courier cylinder from an air-service depot outside London containing archive packets Eliza had insisted be stored offsite after the first false record.
Korr attached a note.
YOU WERE ANNOYING CORRECTLY.
Daran read it twice.
“I like her.”
“You like anyone who insults me accurately.”
“Yes.”
The central archive's public node went down at 16:18. Three district nodes remained. Two libraries mirrored the canon packs. A private collector offered a complete copy of the Schedule Nine public evidence set. An engineering station had the current-authorities wall export.
A school had fifty source guides because Eliza had told Daran to give them away during the earlier review. The teacher sent them back with children's annotations still on the margins. Eliza nearly objected. Then she stopped. Eliza added the school copy to the list, specifying that its margins contained children's notes. Nara's volunteers were compiling the list on butcher paper; the temporary office printers had been claimed by the fire crews.
SCHEDULE NINE — COMPLETE PUBLIC PACKET: 23 confirmed copies.
CONSTITUTIONAL REVIEW HISTORY: 11 complete, 7 partial.
CURRENT AUTHORITY WALL: 8 exports.
GRAHAM FEED RAW MARKET CAPTURE: 6.
ISBISTER TEST MATERIAL: 9.
BELL-TOWER COMPARISON: 14.
COUNCIL IDENTITY SERVICE FORENSIC COPY: 3 sealed, 2 engineering. UNKNOWN PRINCIPAL RECORD: 5 confirmed exports. No column said SAFE.
The columns said FOUND, CHECKED, PARTIAL, MISSING, DAMAGED.
Eliza approved the headings. Beside each entry Daran left room for a name and a method of verification. The schoolteacher signed for her fifty guides in blue pen. A custodian official arrived with a proposal to move recovered material into one guarded municipal repository. Eliza said no before he finished. He looked offended.
“The central building is compromised.”
“Yes.”
“That is why we need a secure replacement.”
“No.”
“You cannot leave unique records scattered across improvised rooms.”
“Unique records should not be scattered. Copies should.”
“What about originals?”
“Originals require custody. Custody does not require one address.”
He stared at her.
“You cannot secure originals at six addresses,” the official said.
“I don't know yet how many originals we'll recover,” Eliza replied. “Give me one guarded dry room, and let the conservators tell us which objects can leave it.”
At eighteen-thirty, Arun found the first thing Eliza was willing to call evidence of sabotage. The east suppression manifold had not failed. It had been isolated. A manual service valve feeding Level Seven east was closed. The position indicator still reported open because the sensor arm had been pinned with a thin metal shim.
Sela found the shim on the floor behind the valve housing. She did not pick it up.
“Photograph.”
The fire engineer did.
“Bag?”
“After the surface cools.”
Arun traced the second suppression path. The inert-gas system had been placed in maintenance bypass. Not by the archive panel. By a service cabinet in the cable floor. The bypass required a key.
The key log showed no authorised maintenance. The third failure was electrical. The local alarm loop had been configured to report normally while suppressing automatic escalation from three rooms. Not all of Level Seven. Three rooms.
Daran read the room numbers. Trustee provenance. Identity migrations. Preservation-office transfers. The overlap was too specific to ignore.
Eliza stood beside the external panel.
“Now?”
Arun said, “Now I call the suppression failures deliberate.”
“The fire?”
“Deliberate suppression defeat. We still need ignition evidence.”
“Good.”
Daran looked at her.
“You wanted him to say fire.”
“I wanted him to say what he knows.”
The ignition evidence came later. Fire crews reached the east rooms after twenty-one hundred. The paper stacks had collapsed. Cable trays had fused. The first room showed two distinct burn origins separated by a concrete partition.
The second showed residue from an accelerant used in cleaning and restoration work. That alone proved little. The archive stored solvents. The third room mattered. A floor channel beneath a sealed provenance cabinet contained char in a pattern inconsistent with spread from the corridor.
The fire engineer marked it.
“Secondary origin.”
Arun asked, “Ignition device?”
“Not yet.”
Eliza waited. The engineer sampled the residue. Another crew found a spent electric initiator beneath a shelf anchor. Industrial. Common enough to buy.
Modified enough to survive heat badly. There was no credential or message at the origins, and no black mark in the rooms the investigators could reach. Eliza listed the two separate burn sites, the defeated suppression paths and the selection of the rooms in a finding headed DELIBERATE IGNITION — STRONGLY SUPPORTED. She left the perpetrator field open.
Daran read the last line.
“You won't say proven?”
“Not until the investigator signs.”
“He will.”
“Then he can say it first.”
The investigator signed at 22:17.
DELIBERATE IGNITION CONSISTENT WITH COORDINATED SUPPRESSION BYPASS.
Eliza changed her heading.
DELIBERATE ATTACK ON CENTRAL ARCHIVE.
No perpetrator. No motive. No shortcut. At 22:31, someone shouted from the east emergency doors. A black circular mark had appeared across the inner panels.
The fire crews stopped. Eliza did not.
“Was it there before evacuation?”
Nobody knew. Pera pulled the building-exit footage. One camera had failed with the power. Another had captured the corridor at 14:27. No mark.
The next surviving image was 15:06. Smoke. No readable door. A firefighter remembered seeing clean metal at 14:40. Memory was not footage.
Eliza recorded it as witness recollection. By the time the building had been cleared, the mark was visible. That established almost nothing about when it was applied.
A custodian officer said, “Black seal.”
Eliza said, “Black circular mark.”
“You know what it means.”
“I know what people call it.”
“We have seen it at the bombing.”
“Yes.”
“And preservation credentials.”
“Yes.”
“Then—”
“No.”
She turned the recorder towards him.
“If you want to say these events are connected, give me the evidence of connection.”
He did not. Pera photographed the doors from four angles. A fire investigator took pigment samples. Nara arrived with two witnesses from the square and asked one question.
“Can we cover it?”
Eliza looked at the doors.
“After the samples.”
“Good.”
After the samples were taken, Nara fixed a sheet of salvage board over the doors. The firefighter who had given his recollection signed the edge with the time he remembered first seeing the metal clean. Eliza recorded the signature as a recollection, not a photograph.
By midnight, the central archive had lost half of Level Seven, most of the east cable spine and enough water-damaged storage below it to make any damage estimate dishonest. The building still stood. That confused the public reports. One bulletin said ARCHIVE DESTROYED. Another said FIRE CONTAINED.
Both were wrong. Eliza published a damage table.
BUILDING — PARTIALLY USABLE.
LEVEL SEVEN EAST — SEVERE LOSS.
LEVEL SEVEN WEST — SMOKE / HEAT DAMAGE.
LOWER STORAGE — WATER DAMAGE UNDER REVIEW.
PUBLIC CATALOGUE NODE — OFFLINE.
DISTRIBUTED RECORD COPIES — ACTIVE.
STAFF ACCOUNT — COMPLETE.
Daran checked the staff account twice. Nobody was missing. Three staff had burns; two firefighters had been treated for smoke. At the southern exchange four engineers were dead, and Eliza had caught herself using their names while she counted the archive's living. Daran called this lucky. She did not correct him. The first argument after midnight was over originals.
A municipal recovery team wanted everything removed from the damaged building and consolidated under guarded custody. Eliza wanted triage. Wet paper needed freezing or drying. Heat-damaged media needed controlled recovery. Stable material did not need to be moved merely because everyone was frightened.
Nara wanted district witnesses. Rook wanted a perimeter. Marian wanted empty estate offices formally loaned rather than silently occupied. Arun wanted temporary storage power separated from the damaged archive circuits. Everyone wanted something different.
Eliza drew four columns.
UNIQUE PHYSICAL OBJECT.
AUTHORITATIVE CONTENT COPY.
WORKING PUBLIC COPY.
UNKNOWN STATUS.
“Those are not places,” Voss said.
“No.”
“Where are the records going?”
“Depends what they are.”
“That will be impossible to secure.”
“Security is not one thing.”
He looked at her. She pointed to the first column.
“Unique objects need custody.”
Second.
“Authoritative copies need authentication and redundancy.”
Third.
“Working public copies need availability.”
Fourth.
“Unknown status needs patience.”
Voss said, “You have built four archives.”
“No.”
She looked around the temporary room.
“I have stopped pretending one building was one archive.”
Before dawn the recovery team opened the first damaged cartons. A trustee clerk's pencil note could not be found in the scan of a burned migration ledger. The order of three loose enclosures inside a folder was gone; the wax impression on a seal had been photographed but not at a resolution that showed its edge. Eliza added each loss under the object number in red pencil. She had Daran check the word LOST against the salvage list before she published it, in case one of the objects had merely been moved.
Daran stared at the word.
“That will upset people.”
“It should.”
“But you just spent twelve hours proving the archive survived.”
“Yes.”
“Those two messages fight.”
“Good.”
Daran held the casualty list beside the recovered holdings list. He put both on the public board. At four-twenty, the first remote reconstruction of the Schedule Nine evidence packet completed. The central copy had been damaged by water. The district library copy was complete. The engineering-station copy had one corrupted image.
The private collector's copy carried a checksum matching the public release. The school copy had handwritten notes but intact source images. Eliza selected none as the new master. Instead she created a reconstruction record. COMPONENT 01 — district library.
COMPONENT 02 — private collector. COMPONENT 03 — engineering station. COMPONENT 04 — public node mirror. Each component had its own custody note. The packet was reassembled from more than one holder.
That pleased Nara.
“It has witnesses.”
“It has sources.”
“Same difference.”
“No.”
Nara sighed.
“Still irritating.”
“Yes.”
The reconstructed packet was published at 04:43. The first requests for the packet arrived before anyone had brought power back to the central catalogue. Daran counted receipts while Eliza checked the component notes once more. By five, there were more verified copies of the Schedule Nine packet than there had been before the fire.
Eliza disliked that this sounded triumphant. Daran liked it. They compromised by publishing the count without an adjective. The fire also exposed weaknesses the attack had not caused. One archive node had been offline for maintenance for nine days.
Nobody had noticed because the central building still worked. A district library held authenticated copies but no documented recovery procedure. Two engineering stations had preserved files without preserving the metadata needed to prove which public release they matched. A private collection had perfect copies and no plan for what happened if the collector died.
Rook's offsite cylinder contained material six days out of date. Eliza added four columns to the holdings list.
COPY EXISTS.
COPY CAN BE VERIFIED.
COPY CAN BE FOUND.
COPY CAN BE HANDED ON.
Four separate columns. Nara looked at it.
“You are inventing paperwork faster than we can burn buildings.”
Eliza stopped writing.
“That is not funny.”
“No.”
Nara sat beside her.
“Sorry.”
Eliza nodded. They worked another hour without speaking. By sunrise, the city had begun donating storage. Not money. Space.
A bakery offered a dry basement. Eliza refused because flour dust was a preservation hazard. The owner looked insulted until she explained. A tram office offered two locked cabinets. Accepted for working copies.
A school offered a classroom. Accepted for public access after classes. The Spine offered three storage racks on separate power circuits. Accepted for digital and machine-readable material. Marian's former estate offices offered climate-controlled rooms once used for account papers.
Accepted for wet-paper recovery and sealed custody. The custodians offered an armed central repository again. Eliza accepted one room. Voss looked surprised.
“You said no.”
“I said no to one replacement archive.”
“And this is?”
“One custody location among several.”
He almost smiled.
“You are very good at making concessions sound like defeats.”
“I learned from government.”
Rook's contribution came by air. Two courier aircraft landed at the western field carrying backup cylinders from depots beyond London. Korr sent inventories ahead of them. The cylinders contained copies of air-command agreements, identity-service extracts, the source tests, system maps and the working charter. No unique originals.
No miraculous missing archive. Copies. Rook arrived with the first cylinder himself. Eliza asked why.
“I wanted to see whether you would still call them copies.”
“They are copies.”
He looked disappointed.
“They survived a fire.”
“That does not make them originals.”
“Can they run the city?”
“That does not make them originals either.”
Rook looked at Nara.
“She enjoys this.”
Nara said, “She doesn't.”
That silenced him. Eliza opened the cylinder. The seal was intact. She recorded its custody chain. Rook signed.
The courier pilot signed beneath Rook, whose mark sat beside a dent in the cylinder. Eliza attached Korr's earlier inventory and described the dent in the receiving note. The central catalogue came back online at 07:18. Not from the central archive.
From a temporary mirror at the Spine.
A banner across the top read:
DISTRIBUTED RECOVERY INSTANCE — DO NOT TREAT LOCATION AS AUTHORITY.
Pera had written it. Eliza approved it immediately. The catalogue showed damaged central holdings beside verified external copies. A reader could see when a public text survived while a physical original was lost. A reader could see when an original survived but no remote copy existed.
A reader could see when nobody yet knew. On the public mirror, the trustee ledger's surviving scan appeared beside the notice that the bound volume was gone. Eliza saw the two entries together on an old lobby terminal and asked Pera to check the same view on a district screen. At 07:40, the first public request arrived.
A student wanted the trustee migration ledger from Level Seven. The physical volume was gone. The scan survived in two places. Eliza sent the scan. Then she added a note.
PHYSICAL ORIGINAL LOST IN CENTRAL ARCHIVE FIRE.
The student wrote back:
I'M SORRY.
Eliza stared at the words longer than she expected. Then she returned to work.
The metal case was found at 09:06. Not in Level Seven. That was the first surprise. A recovery worker found it in a collapsed service cavity between Levels Six and Seven, wedged behind a cable riser where water had pooled without reaching it.
The recovery worker found no catalogue number, owner tag or familiar mark on the narrow steel case. He kept the latch closed and called Pera, who called Eliza. Eliza called the fire investigator. The case went first to the temporary evidence room, not the archive reading tables. Kest came.
Arun came from the southern exchange still wearing yesterday's clothes. Nara arrived with one public witness. Marian came with Ansel. Rook did not come. He sent Korr, who said someone had to keep the aircraft flying.
Eliza approved of that more than she said. The case was photographed closed. Measured. Weighed. Swabbed.
Its exterior carried soot from the building but no heat deformation. The hinge was old. The latch was newer. Arun looked at the join.
“Reused case.”
“Probably,” Eliza said.
“Can we open it?”
“After the investigator.”
The investigator nodded. Kest recorded the time.
09:41.
Eliza opened the latch. The case held a single dry sheet. The cavity had been wet when the worker found it, but the seal might have protected paper for years. Eliza asked the investigator to record the moisture at the cavity and to test the latch before they dated anything by the sheet's condition.
The sheet contained typed text on one side. At the top was a symbol. Nobody in the room recognised it. Not the black circular mark. Not the sleeping eye beneath the black sun.
It differed from every preservation-office seal they had catalogued and looked almost like a bracket surrounding an empty centre. Pera started to sketch it. Eliza stopped her.
“Photograph first.”
Pera lowered the pencil. The body of the text was stranger. Not because it was encrypted. Because it was administrative. Short fields.
Role references. Continuity terms. A phrase about preferred authority resolution. A note about the absence of a recognised principal. No signature.
No date. No catalogue number. No issuing office. At the bottom was one word.
UNKNOWN.
Nobody spoke. Arun looked physically ill. Nara looked at him.
“What?”
He pointed at the word.
“That is not proof it is the same record.”
“No,” Eliza said.
“It could be a category. Or whoever typed the sheet may have seen the public notice,” Arun said.
“The type mechanism looks older than the notice,” Eliza replied. “That still won't tell us which UNKNOWN this means.”
He pushed the case an inch farther from the transcript of the registry entry. They began with the obvious tests. Paper stock. Ink. Typeface.
Machine marks. Fibre. Water exposure. Soot transfer. The sheet was not fresh.
That was all the first examination could establish. It had been in a sealed environment during the fire. The type mechanism was older than the current archive printers. How much older required comparison. The symbol appeared nowhere in the current archive index.
That did not mean it appeared nowhere. Daran began searching remote copies. Pera photographed every field. Kest opened a custody record. Nara's witness watched.
Marian read without touching. The line that held her attention was not UNKNOWN.
It was a phrase in the middle of the page:
WHEN NO RECOGNISED PRINCIPAL RESOLVES, CONTINUITY SHALL SEEK—
The sentence ended there. Not with damage. Not with a torn edge. A dash. The next field began underneath.
Eliza read it twice.
Arun said, “Seek what?”
“Not yet.”
“That is what it says.”
“No. It says seek.”
He looked at her.
“Archivist.”
“Yes.”
Nara leaned over the table.
“What do we call this?”
Eliza looked at the unnumbered sheet.
“The recovered unprovenanced record.”
“That will never survive public use.”
“It does not need to be popular.”
Pera said, “UNKNOWN record.”
Eliza closed her eyes. The name was already better than hers. That made it dangerous. By noon, people had begun asking for the sheet. Eliza kept it in sealed custody until the investigator gave her a recovery account she could publish alongside the image. She added blank fields where an ordinary entry would carry issuer, date and pre-fire location. The blank fields would appear above the transcript.
She prepared the release.
RECOVERED FROM CENTRAL ARCHIVE FIRE DEBRIS.
EXACT PRE-FIRE LOCATION UNKNOWN.
CATALOGUE ENTRY — NONE FOUND.
ISSUER — UNKNOWN.
DATE — UNDER EXAMINATION.
RELATION TO DELEGATED PRINCIPAL UNKNOWN — NOT ESTABLISHED.
RELATION TO BLACK-SEAL EVENTS — NOT ESTABLISHED.
RELATION TO RESPONSIVE GRAHAM PRESENTATION — NOT ESTABLISHED.
Then the image. Then the transcript. Then the custody record. Daran read the page.
“You put UNKNOWN three times before they even reach the word UNKNOWN.”
“Yes.”
“That might actually work.”
“It will not.”
“You're improving.”
At 12:17, the record went public.
Within four minutes, somebody posted a headline:
SECRET UNKNOWN PROTOCOL FOUND IN BURNED ARCHIVE.
Eliza sighed. Pera showed her another.
FIRE FAILS TO DESTROY MASTER KEY.
There was no key.
Another:
PROOF BLACK SEAL BUILT INTO CITY FROM START.
There was no proof. Eliza closed the screen. Outside the temporary office, people were lining up to see the recovered sheet. Not the original. A verified image.
The original stayed in sealed custody. Pera checked the image checksum against the sealed original's capture. Daran sent the verified public copy to each district node, then waited for their receipts before shutting down the temporary terminal. At sunset, Eliza returned to the central archive. The east side still smelled of wet ash. The emergency doors remained behind salvage board.
Level Seven was closed. She stood in the lobby where the public catalogue terminals had gone dark the day before. One terminal had power again. The temporary catalogue showed Schedule Nine's source images, the raw market capture, the Graham principal's migration history, the western grain corridor log, the exchange incident and the new sheet from the case. Each entry bore a holder and a check date. The burned building still appeared against the entries for objects it had lost. Eliza opened the trustee ledger's record and found the surviving scan next to the unfilled box for the original's last shelf location. She entered the floor and bay from memory, then marked the location UNVERIFIED.
Daran found her before she left the terminal. “Going home?”
Eliza showed him the provisional original-location note. “Do you remember which bay held the trustee ledger?”
“The east wall. Second bay from the stair.”
“I thought third.”
“We moved it after the review. I carried the box.”
She cleared the location field and filed both recollections as separate dated notes. Daran took the pen from her when her hand began to shake. Outside, the fire crews were rolling up their hoses; the lobby terminal hummed under its borrowed power.