Chapter 13: Mira and the Dead Man's Partial Testimony

The third misdirected document arrived on a Wednesday, routed through a deceased officer's still-active internal credential, and Mira almost redirected it before she read the subject line.

She had redirected the first two without opening them. This had been easy, the first time — a routing error was a routing error, the deceased officer's name meant nothing to her beyond its absence from the Bureau's active personnel manifest, and Mira had built her professional survival on the discipline of not looking at things that were not hers to look at. She had redirected the second document with slightly more deliberation, the way she always deliberated slightly more the second time a pattern presented itself, and then she had returned to her transit compliance audit and spent the remainder of that afternoon being very thorough about shuttle licensing irregularities in the Velanthi corridor, which contained nothing that could damage her.

The third document arrived fourteen days after the second. The subject line read: OPERATIONAL DEBRIEF — INTERNAL CLASSIFICATION — EYES OF RECEIVING PARTY ONLY.