Box 47

The recruiter had called it "records support," which I now understood meant sitting in a windowless room at Corvale Industries with forty-seven cardboard boxes of paper nobody had touched in a decade. Temp work paid weekly. I did not ask questions.

My job was simple: scan each safety inspection report, log the date and site number into the database, then file the original in long-term storage. Nine dollars over minimum wage to feed a scanner all day. I could do that in my sleep.

By Wednesday I could recite the boilerplate. "Facility surveyed per OSHA guideline 1910.147. No deficiencies noted requiring immediate correction." Same font. Same margins. I'd read maybe two hundred of them.

Then I hit two reports filed six days apart, both signed by the same inspector, Raymond Fenwick — one for a plant in Ohio, one for a plant in Arizona.

I checked the dates twice. Same week. Two thousand miles apart.

Coincidence, maybe. Inspectors traveled. I logged it and kept going, because that was the job, and the job was the only steady thing I'd had in eleven months.

Thursday afternoon my supervisor, a broad-shouldered man named Gerald Voss who wore his suit like it cost more than my rent, stopped by my desk with his hands in his pockets.

"How's the archive coming?"

"Good. Almost through box forty."

"Forty-seven's the last one for this batch." He said it lightly, but his eyes moved to the box at my feet like he was counting something. "Don't rush. Accuracy matters more than speed here."

"Of course."

He left. I finished the box I was on, reached for forty-seven, and found a strip of red tape across the lid that hadn't been there on the others.

Someone had written on it, in block letters gone soft with age: RESTRICTED — DO NOT SCAN.

It was already open in my hands.