Chapter 24: What the Audit Layer Found

The wire services moved faster than Seren had predicted.

By three-seventeen, seventeen minutes after Arthur stepped away from the podium, the AP had filed its main piece and three follows. Reuters published at three-twenty-two. The Financial Times had a correspondent who'd been covering the SEC inquiry for eleven days and her analysis ran at three-forty with a subhead that read: *Camelot CEO releases full audit record, company's own AI finds its own violations*. She had used the phrase "deliberately self-incriminating architecture" and the phrase traveled, as phrases do, instantly and everywhere.

Arthur read it in the green room on Seren's phone. She had taken it back from him after a moment and said, simply, "That's the one that's going to set the frame," and he had nodded because she was right and because he was too tired to do anything with the information except accept it.