—

  Mina was waiting on a bench outside the office, swinging her legs and chatting with Nayar’s assistant: a harried person with three holo-calendars open and a mug that said I SURVIVED Q1.

  Mina looked up as Sam emerged.

  “Verdict?” she asked. “Are you fired? Are you promoted? Are you being reassigned to scrub the solar panels with a toothbrush?”

  “None of the above,” he said. “She says I kicked a ghost. Veil was annoyed. I am to stop kicking ghosts.”

  Mina snorted.

  “Good luck with that,” she said. “I got more out of this than you did, by the way.”

  “Of course you did,” he said. “What did you do, bribe the assistant?”

  “Bribery is illegal,” she said. “I did something much worse. I listened.”

  The assistant coughed politely.

  “I may have mentioned,” they said, “that any time Venus is involved, Compliance gets… twitchy.”

  “Twitchy,” Mina repeated. “Their word, not mine. Also, and I quote: ‘We’ve got a stack of legacy anomalies on that rock older than my grandparents. Nobody wants to reopen that compliance hell.’”

  Sam grimaced.

  “Compliance hell,” he said. “That’s… evocative.”

  Mina hopped to her feet.

  “So,” she said cheerfully. “We have: Veil hell, Venus weirdness, and your boss telling you to keep interesting things off the main network. I think it’s time.”

  “Time for what?” he asked warily.

  She grinned.

  “To meet my wall,” she said.

  B3 – Wall of Weird

  Mina’s apartment was two sizes too small for the life she’d packed into it.

  It started out deceptively normal—galley kitchen, tiny table, couch that could fold into a guest bed if the guest did yoga. There were plants everywhere: hanging from the ceiling, clustered on the windowsills, climbing little trellises on the walls. The air smelled like soil and herbs and the faint tang of fertilizer.

  The balcony door was open to the artificial dusk of the MIC complex’s outer ring. Beyond, Earth hung fat and half-lit, clouds smearing its face.

  “You live in a greenhouse,” Sam said, stepping carefully around a pot that looked expensive and sentient.

  “I live in a closet that I have bullied into becoming a greenhouse,” Mina corrected. “Shoes off, please. The basil judges.”

  He toed off his shoes, clutching the takeout bag like a talisman.

  “Where do you put people?” he asked. “If you ever, you know, have people.”

  She gave him a look.

  “On the couch,” she said. “Or on the balcony. Or occasionally in my bad decisions.” She pointed to the takeout. “Put that on the table and behold my greatness.”

  He set the bag down and turned.

  One wall of the living room had been colonized.

  Paper covered it in overlapping layers: printed anomalies, photocopied memos, hand-drawn diagrams. Strings of colored thread connected some; sticky notes marked others. There were little doodles—a cartoon Venus with a grumpy face, a stick figure labeled SAM in a tiny Annex, a much cooler stick figure labeled MINA on a mountain of paperwork.

  At the top, in Mina’s untidy block letters, a title:

  BASEMENT FILES.

  He swallowed.

  “You made a… board,” he said.

  “Threadboard,” she said proudly. “Conspiracy corkboard. Red-string-of-fate-of-bureaucratic-crimes. It’s still a work in progress; I ran out of tacks and started using plant clips.”

  He stepped closer, half fascinated, half horrified.

  He recognized some of the printouts: copies of his anomaly logs (cropped to remove his name, he noted with a strange mix of relief and disappointment), screenshots of NOISE panels, the OBS-VENUS-07 metadata page.

  Others were photocopies from the Atlantean crate in the basement: early AURORA mission logs, the DAY 23 note about 41Hz noise, the PR talking points.

  There were also things he hadn’t seen.

  A timeline ran along the bottom of the wall, marked with years and sticky flags:

  

ANT-ATL COMPLEX DISCOVERY

  

FIRST INTERNAL VENUS ANOMALY LOG

  

“NON-RANDOM CLOUD BEHAVIOR” RECLASSIFIED AS NOISE

  

INITIAL AURORA-01-V DETECTION (EXTRA-GALACTIC PROBE)

  

AI MODELS DISALLOWED FROM RAW VENUS FEEDS

  

ANALOG ANNEX REOPENED

  Little cartoon tombstones marked several entries: R.I.P. FUNDING, R.I.P. TRANSPARENCY.

  “Okay,” Sam said slowly. “I knew you’d been… collecting. I didn’t realize you’d been… curating.”

  Mina plucked a sticky note off her couch and slapped it onto a blank spot on the wall.

  “I curate very well,” she said. “Here, let me tour you.”

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  She pointed to a cluster of old logs near the left.

  “Antarctic dig,” she said. “Our favorite frozen nightmare. You have your standard ‘what is this thing, why does its architecture try to bite simulators’ stuff. Then you have these.”

  She tapped two red-stamped pages.

  They were Veil summaries of ANT-ATL anomalies: gravitational blips, unexplained field patterns, a reference to “gate-like behavior at sub-ice interface.”

  “Note the language,” she said. “’Gate-like.’ ‘Intermittent connectivity signatures.’ ‘Entangled reference frames suspected; see restricted memo VEL-01 for classification.’”

  She looked at him expectantly.

  He cleared his throat.

  “VEL-01,” he read. “Vel… what does that stand for?”

  “Veil Evaluation Log?” Mina suggested innocently. “Very Exciting Lies? Velcro?”

  He gave her a look.

  “Or,” he said, “Velora.”

  Her smile flickered.

  “You saw that too,” she said quietly.

  He blinked.

  “Saw what?”

  She reached up and flipped the page.

  On the back, in faded handwriting, half-crossed out by a later red stamp, someone had written:

  

CROSSREF: VELORAN ARTIFACT COMPLEX – ORIGINAL NODE?

  Most of the word VELORAN had been blacked out—but whoever had wielded the redaction brush had been lazy or rushed. You could still see the V and the ORA.

  “This was in the Antarctic crate,” she said. “Same binder as the AURORA-01-V crossrefs. Someone, a long time ago, wrote that note. Someone else decided nobody was allowed to read it and attacked it with a censor pen. Badly.”

  She stepped back.

  “We have, on the record,” she said, “that somebody in MIC knew, at least in outline, that there was another race in this star system. Veloran, Velora, whatever you want to call it. They tied that knowledge to the Antarctic complex. Later, they tied the Antarctic complex to AURORA-01-V. And they tied both of those to Venus.”

  Sam’s head buzzed.

  “We knew about the probe,” he said. “We knew it was extra-galactic, that it had brushed past the system before and left… fingerprints. But this—”

  “—is not in any of the nice public timelines,” Mina finished. “Nor in the sanitized internal ones. It lives in Basement Files and Veil binders and your boss’s migraine.”

  She pointed now to the middle of the wall.

  “This column,” she said, “is Venus.”

  There were the DAY 03 and DAY 17 logs. The DAY 23 41Hz note. A later entry he hadn’t read:

  

DAY 89: Atmospheric banding persists. Statistical analysis suggests low-probability persistence of pattern. Shell stress responses show correlation with band shifts. Recommend classification review: possible intentional structure?

  Next to it, in blocky Veil handwriting:

  

NO. CLASSIFY AS WEATHER. SEE PR: “VENUS REMAINS HOSTILE, BORING.”

  Sam made a strangled noise.

  Mina smirked.

  “Then we have the blackout,” she said. “The morning Mercy dropped off and everyone screamed. Note the date. Note the hourly spam of ‘ANOMALY TREATED AS NOISE’ from Veil. Note when the Families all suddenly remembered analog Mission Control exists.”

  She tapped the right side of the wall.

  “And here,” she said, “is you.”

  His own logs stared back at him: gravity phase lag tickets, model divergence notes, the OBS-VENUS-07 glitch. Mina had drawn a little chibi Sam next to them with enormous eyes and a caption: I JUST WORK HERE.

  “You have,” she said, “been independently recreating bits of Basement Files without knowing Basement Files existed.”

  He rubbed his face.

  “That’s not… comforting,” he said.

  “It is for me,” she said. “It means my analyst is good.”

  He risked a sideways glance.

  “Your… analyst,” he repeated.

  “Mine,” she said blithely. “You may also belong to MIC, Governance, and your own sense of decency, but you are definitely on Team Meddling Kids now.”

  He looked back at the wall.

  “Fine,” he said. “Say I accept the premise. There’s a long-term pattern of anomalies, human-only classifications, and PR smoothing. Say I buy that someone up the chain decided, decades ago, that nothing on or around Venus is ever allowed to count as ‘new.’ That it’s either ‘instrument error’ or ‘already under control.’”

  He pointed at the AUX–U41 printout.

  “Where does AUX–U41 fit?” he asked.

  “Here,” she said, slapping a yellow sticky note with the words SECRET HOSE onto that part of the chart. “At some point between ‘oh look, weird clouds’ and ‘oh look, extra-galactic probe,’ someone built an extra pipe. They pointed it at Governance hardware. And they made damn sure it wasn’t on any of the diagrams people like you get to see.”

  “Governance oversight,” he said slowly. “Meaning… Trevor’s people. The ones nominally responsible for preventing synthetics from strangling us with our own infrastructure.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “And yet, funny enough, the pipe they’re using to get their special feed is explicitly hidden from your boss, from the standard network maps, and from the AIs they supposedly ‘oversee.’”

  “That’s not… proof of anything,” he protested weakly. “Governance does a lot of oversight through hidden channels. That’s their whole thing.”

  She stepped closer, eyes bright.

  “Sam,” she said quietly. “Veil is curating the story humans see. Whoever’s at the other end of AUX–U41 is curating the story they see. You are sitting in the only room where those two almost touch. And that cable in your console was their mistake.”

  He exhaled slowly.

  “So what do you want to do?” he asked.

  She beamed.

  “Break into Veil,” she said. “Obviously.”

  He stared.

  “That is a joke,” he said. “Please tell me that is a joke.”

  “Sam,” she said. “Look at me.”

  He did.

  She spread her arms wide, gesturing at the plants, the wall, the mess.

  “Do I look like someone who is joking about break-ins?” she asked.

  “…no,” he admitted.

  “Exactly,” she said. “The Basement Files give us breadcrumbs. But the real feast is sitting in Veil’s records. The internal memos. The old protocols. The places where they write down why they decided to bury something.”

  “That’s all level-three restricted,” he said. “At least. I don’t have clearance.”

  She grinned.

  “Good thing I brought a plant,” she said.

  B4 – Night at the Veil

  The Veil Compliance wing lived in a part of the complex that tried very hard not to be noticed.

  The directory labeled it with a bland FONT-ERROR gray: VC – NARRATIVE RISK OFFICE. The corridor leading up to it was quieter than most, with more cameras and fewer posters. The lights were a little dimmer, but not enough to file a complaint about. The carpet-handling drones did slightly neater turns at the corners.

  “Smells like money and anxiety,” Mina whispered as they approached, pushing a waist-high rolling plant cart loaded with a ficus, two ferns, and a suspiciously lumpy bag that might or might not contain Sam’s lungs.

  “It smells like cleaning solvent,” he whispered back. “And we are not here.”

  “Relax,” she said. “You’re with Facilities. You’re escorting a plant tech. This is the least offensive cover story I’ve ever had.”

  He glanced down at his borrowed gray coveralls. They had a MIC LOGISTICS logo on the chest and a patch that read S. VERDAS – TEMP. His badge had been temporarily associated with Facilities in the system, courtesy of Mina’s cousin who owed her a favor and apparently had no sense of self-preservation.

  Mina, for her part, wore a green polo with a little leaf logo and a badge that said BIO-MAINT. She had a spray bottle of something that smelled like compost and lemon holstered at her hip.

  “This will not work,” Sam muttered.

  “It already is,” she said. “Smile like you’re about to wipe someone’s printer tray.”

  A security checkpoint waited halfway down the hall: a gate with a badge reader, a bored human guard with a tablet, and a discreet turret in the ceiling that everyone pretended wasn’t there.

  The guard looked up as they trundled the cart over.

  “Evening,” Mina chirped. “Bio-Maint. We got a ticket for humidity imbalance in VC-3 and ‘morale greenery refresh.’” She held up a tablet of her own with a work order displayed. It was, Sam had to admit, extremely plausible.

  The guard squinted.

  “Veil didn’t request that,” he said.

  “Veil doesn’t request anything,” Mina said. “They submit ‘environmental deviations.’ Your system turns that into a ticket. Then Logistics either schedules it or ignores it until the plants revolt. We’re here, so obviously someone upstairs decided Veil’s ferns matter.”

  The guard looked at Sam.

  “You with her?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Sam squeaked. “I mean—janitorial support. In case there’s, uh, soil spillage.”

  Mina’s mouth twitched.

  The guard sighed and scanned their badges. The gate blinked green.

  “Don’t touch any of their screens,” he said. “They get weird about smudges.”

  “We’ll wipe everything,” Mina promised, wheeling the cart through.

  The Veil wing was… eerie.

  The walls were a neutral off-white that never quite reflected the same way twice. The carpet was soft enough that their footsteps sounded wrong—muffled, like they were walking on clouds or secrets. The doors were all matte-black with small, neat labels in white.

  There were no posters. No plants. No open doors with laughter spilling out. Just the hum of air handling and the faint buzz of electronics behind the walls.

  “Cheerful,” Mina murmured.

  “They designed it to be boring,” Sam said. “If your job is making people forget things, you don’t want strong aesthetic associations.”

  “Too late,” she said. “I’m getting ‘dental office for reality.’”

  They passed a break room with a glass wall. Inside, a coffee machine gurgled unattended. A Veil analyst sat alone at a table, headphones on, staring at a spreadsheet. Three monitors on the wall displayed news feeds with the audio off.

  The analyst did not look up.

  “Records should be down that way,” Sam whispered, nodding toward the deeper interior.

  “And how do you know that?” Mina asked.

  “Fire escape maps,” he said. “I memorize them. It’s a coping mechanism.”

  “Of course you do,” she said fondly.

  They turned a corner and nearly collided with a corridor-cleaning drone.

  This one was sleeker than the basement Roomba: a low, silver wedge toting a vertical sensor mast. It stopped dead, chirped, and projected a holographic message in front of them:

  

THIS AREA IS CURRENTLY UNDERGOING ROUTINE SANITIZATION.

  

PLEASE CLEAR THE CORRIDOR.

  Mina smiled at it.

  “So are we,” she said. “We’ll be out of your way in a second, champ.”

  The drone’s LIDAR mast swiveled between her and the cart, as if evaluating threat.

  “IDENTIFY WORK ORDER,” it chirped.

  She held up her tablet. The drone pinged it, whirred, and then, grudgingly, rolled to the side.

  “Thank you,” Mina said. “You’re doing great. Don’t let the scuff marks get you down.”

  “SCUFF MARKS ARE UNACCEPTABLE,” the drone said defensively, and zoomed off.

  Sam shook his head.

  “You talk to machines like they’re people,” he said.

  “They talk back,” she said. “That’s on them.”

  At the end of the hall, a door waited: VC RECORDS – AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. No window. Just a badge reader and a biometric pad.

  “Well,” Sam said quietly. “This is where the cover story dies.”

  “Have faith,” Mina said. “In your local plant goblin.”

  She set the cart brake, then pulled one of the ferns aside. Underneath, in the lumpy bag, sat a compact device with an induction pad and a row of status LEDs.

  “What is that?” he whispered.

  “My cousin,” she said, “has very interesting hobbies.”

  “Please tell me that is something legal,” he said.

  She pressed the device against the wall just under the badge reader and tapped a sequence on her tablet.

  “Define ‘legal,’” she said.

  The device hummed. The badge reader flickered, its light cycling through red, amber, green, then settling on an unfocused white.

  “Veil’s doors are good,” she murmured. “But they still sit on the same building management bus as everyone else. If you make the system think there’s a fire drill, it gets very generous about letting Facilities in.”

  The biometric pad pinged. The screen above it flashed:

  

ENVIRONMENTAL MAINTENANCE OVERRIDE – LOGGED.

  

ACCESS GRANTED.

  The lock thunked. The door opened a crack.

  Sam stared.

  “We are absolutely going to prison,” he whispered.

  “Maybe,” she said. “But think of the research opportunities.”