Chapter Two
I always come in early on Mondays.
The building is calmer before it fills—no overlapping conversations, no phones ringing, only the low murmur of everything waking up.
My office lights are off, the door closed, and my coffee mug on the warmer. I pull a granola bar from my purse and place it next to my keyboard.
The laptop hums softly as it boots. I didn’t think about work over the weekend. Much.
Patterns don’t clarify under pressure. They do it when I give them time to breathe.
Now I need to know whether what I saw was real—or just my brain doing what it does when there’s nothing else to chew on.
The archived logs open quickly. No system lag at all. Almost like they’ve been waiting for me. I run a search for the contractor ID in my private note–G-96.
That same contractor ID is tied to forty-three different ops over the past few years. That shouldn’t be possible. GSD has safeguards in place to stop field teams from being pushed so hard they burn out.
I scroll through the list, and find an op I recognize.
I was on that team, with Marisol Vega running point.
She brewed coffee strong enough to strip paint, and cracked jokes through a hostile checkpoint like a stand-up comedian.
Our team leader gave her hell for it, but he couldn’t deny she’d kept us alive—and out of a Russian prison—that day.
I always hoped I’d work with her again, but she retired a few months later.
Huh. More blank arrival and departure fields.
That can’t be right. I would have noticed them during the debrief.
I scroll down to the after-action summary notes, hoping to find an explanation.
Most of them are boilerplate. Standard. Medical sign-offs, fitness summaries, affidavits. Then I find a status I don’t expect.
External mitigation.
Mitigation doesn’t simply exist. It happens. Leaves traces. Approvals, methods, follow-ups. There should be a report explaining what was mitigated, why, and who signed off on it. And everyone on the op should have been notified.
Instead, the field agent ID tied to the status is missing, and their physical location is set to something I’ve never seen before.
RJ-3.
I try to search for the code. The system spins, then returns me to the previous screen. No error message. No access warning. Just a clean reset, as if the request never happened.
That’s unusual. GSD’s databases are many things. Defensive. Redundant. Occasionally petty.
But they don’t ignore you.
I go back to the activity log and compare the personnel list at the beginning of the file with the individual debrief summaries in the after-action report. Six agents started the op. Only five are listed at the end. Marisol is missing.
Two hours later, I sit back and let my gaze unfocus, keeping my expression neutral while my thoughts keep moving. I smooth my sleeve where the fabric sits flush against my wrist. My body wants to react, but I haven’t decided how yet.
I’ve gone through eight of the forty-three ops tied to the contractor ID in question.
Six of them reference RJ-3 and external mitigation.
Two of those link to agents who’ve retired—including Marisol.
Four of them reference personnel who aren’t on any active duty roster.
They’re not listed as retired. Or separated. Or disciplined.
They’re just…gone.
Four women. Different areas of operation. Years apart. The same abrupt endpoint in every file.
Whatever RJ-3 is, it doesn’t behave like any status code I’ve worked with before. I don’t know who authorizes it. I only know when it appears.
A soft knock sounds on my door.
Tessa sticks her head in. “You busy?”
“Depends,” I say. “Are you about to make me so?”
She smiles and steps inside, her Systems Superhero mug clutched in her hands. “I was pulling comparative outcomes for last quarter…” She hesitates for a moment. “And I ran into something strange.”
“Define strange.”
“I was looking at aggregate recovery timelines,” she says. “Time out after injury. Return-to-duty rates. Where people land afterward. No names. Just trends.”
That’s standard. Exactly the kind of thing she should be doing.
“And?”
She hesitates again. “The last file in the dataset was…different. Every employee ID in it had an injury code, then a role change, but the medical reviews were incomplete. They all ended with some obscure reference and a note about Occupational Health requesting reassignment. That’s strange, right?”
My pulse ticks up sharply. She’s still a junior analyst. She shouldn’t have access to medical reviews. You need senior-level clearance for that. “Maybe,” I say lightly. “But it’s not something you need to worry about. I’m sure that last file was just glitchy. It happens sometimes.”
She frowns. “But—”
“Send it to me. I’ll take a look. If it’s a bug the programmers want to see, I’ll loop you in.”
She pauses, then nods.
When she leaves, I sit very still and let my thoughts settle.
Tessa isn’t cleared for Medical. There are only two analysts in the building who are. I’m one, and my supervisor, Claire, is the other. Whatever file Tessa found shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
The whoosh of a new email breaks the silence. I open the file and stare at the screen for several seconds. The obscure reference before the update about Occupational Health? It’s one I recognize.
RJ-3.
I reopen the private note I started on Friday and strip everything related to RJ-3 down to dates, time stamps, and op codes. After another hour, I’ve found two more field agents whose personnel files end abruptly.
I don’t know what any of it means yet. So I save the note off the network and turn back to my queue. I can’t make sense of the pattern yet, and without context, conclusions are meaningless.
Ellen might have seen this type of thing before. She spent nearly twenty-five years at GSD before she retired. Half of it in the field, the rest in Systems. I’ll call her tomorrow for a sanity check.
The building hums around me, a constant vibration of air and electricity that’s peaceful and almost reassuring, as I lock my screen and head for the break room to get another cup of coffee.