The Initials on the Draft

I didn't sleep much that week. I kept the newsletter folded in my bag like it might dissolve if I let it out of my sight.

I needed someone who understood how the department actually worked, someone who wouldn't report me to Voss for opening a restricted box. Priya Ahmed was the only senior analyst who'd ever been kind to me — she'd shown me the scanner settings my first week, brought me coffee without being asked.

I found her at lunch, away from the break room cameras, and told her everything. The duplicate wording. The travel receipt. My father's name in a newsletter I wasn't supposed to have.

She went very still.

"You shouldn't have opened forty-seven," she said, quiet.

"I know that. I need to know if I'm seeing what I think I'm seeing."

"What do you think you're seeing?"

"That someone's been faking inspections at Site 4 for at least a decade. That my dad might have died because of it."

Priya didn't answer right away. She turned her coffee cup a slow half-circle on the table, and I watched something move behind her eyes that wasn't surprise. It was closer to dread.

"Naomi. Let it go. Please. For your own sake."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I can give you."

She left before I finished my sandwich, and I sat there turning her words over, the wrongness of them, how fast she'd moved from concern to warning. On instinct — a bad one, probably — I went back to the archive that evening and pulled the earliest Site 4 report I could find, a hand-typed draft from twelve years back, long before the digital templates existed.

Stapled to the back was a memo, drafted in the same boilerplate language that would repeat for the next decade.

Reviewed and approved for standard language, it read.

Initialed, in blue pen gone pale with age: P.A.