"They’ll see thousands of unaccounted-for worker profiles with corrupted identity tags," Cazvik finished, his voice rising into a sharp, hysterical note that echoed off the raw, unadorned concrete walls. "You didn't save them, Jorvex. You just orphaned them in the system. Without a valid ID hash or an active payroll cluster, they don't exist on paper anymore. They aren't employees. They aren't debtors. They're ghosts."Jorvex stepped forward, the heels of his boots crunching loudly over shattered glass and twisted pieces of server housing. "Better a ghost than a quarterly write-off, Cazvik. At least they can walk out of the front doors.""Walk out to where?" Cazvik jabbed a soot-stained finger toward the high, wired-glass windows overlooking the street below. "Look down there, you absolute fool. The glamour is gone. The facade peeled back. There are no transit vouchers left, no corporate housing credits, no subsidized meal tokens. The moment those doors open, they're walking into a ci

"They won't find a single incriminating signature," Jorvex finished for him, his voice flat, steady, and entirely devoid of the panic that currently had Cazvik's fingers clawing frantically at his own throat. "Because you already shredded the physical ledger copies before I hit the main breaker, didn't you, Cazvik?"Cazvik froze, the violent cough dying instantly in his raw, scorched throat. His eyes widened behind cracked wire-rimmed glasses, darting sideways toward the rusted metal filing cabinets sitting half-submerged in a puddle of dirty water near the collapsed drywall."I don't know what you're talking about," Cazvik lied, his voice dropping an octave into a defensive, reedy squeak that completely betrayed him."You spent the last three hours of the lockdown down in sub-level four," Jorvex said, stepping entirely into the analyst's personal space, forcing the smaller man to press his spine harder against the dead, silent cooling unit. "I saw the access logs before the local cac

"If they find the physical shreds," Jorvex interrupted, his voice dropping into a razor-sharp register, "they audit the parent company right down to its foundational shell. That is why you didn't burn them. You kept them as an insurance policy against your own bosses."Cazvik’s thin lips parted, but no sound came out. The color completely drained from his face, leaving his skin the exact shade of the soot-dusted concrete floor beneath their boots. He looked less like a senior analyst and more like a cornered rat realizing the trap had finally snapped shut."An insurance policy," Cazvik echoed, the reedy squeak returning to his voice, though this time it carried a bitter, hollow edge. "You call it an insurance policy. I call it the only reason I'm breathing right now, Jorvex. You think Mair was going to let me walk out of here with a pension after the Tuesday resets went public? He had a team of cleaners waiting in the subterranean garage forty minutes before you flipped the main break

"Cooperating witness?" Cazvik barked out a harsh, jagged laugh that sounded suspiciously like a dry cough, his fingers finally snagging a small, heavily scratched data cartridge from his breast pocket. "The state investigators are owned by the exact same shell corporations that built this tower, Jorvex. You really think a few government paper-pushers are going to throw handcuffs on executives who fund their reelection campaigns?"Jorvex didn't flinch, his hand remaining steady, palm up, waiting. "They won't have a choice once the primary ledger reels are entered into the public registry. The scale of the Tuesday resets is too massive to sweep under a bureaucratic rug. It’s not just a few cooked books; it's thousands of missing identities, erased debt slaves, and engineered financial casualties. The scandal is too big to bury.""You underestimate their capacity for burial," Cazvik whispered, his hand hovering over the cold metal of the data cartridge, refusing to let go just yet. His k