Chapter 8: Mira Transfers for the Second Time

The transfer request took eleven minutes to process, which was faster than her previous one by four days.

Mira had submitted it on a Thursday morning, from a terminal in the outer corridor of the Bureau's third-floor administrative wing rather than her own workstation, because she had learned fourteen months ago that terminal-of-origin metadata was preserved in personnel file updates and she had no particular desire to leave a geographical record of when and where she had decided to run. The request cited professional development interests and a preference for field-adjacent compliance work. Both were demonstrably supportable by her performance record. Neither was true.

The approval notification arrived while she was in the facility commissary, eating a meal she could not afterward remember selecting. She read it on her personal comm, then returned the tray, then walked back to her workstation by the long route — through the archive wing's secondary corridor, past the sealed classification vault that held incident files dating back eleven years, past the sub-basement stairwell she had not descended in nine weeks and would not descend again.