Caleb leaned closer. “Who said that?”
“Ms. Heller, in November. She was looking at a screen while we waited outside the office. She said her override queue was backing up.”
“Did you write the exact words?”
“Yes. But I didn't know what they meant.”
Caleb photographed the page after asking permission. He sent it to Rebecca. Mira watched the indicator show that the message had been delivered.
A reply appeared almost immediately: DON'T DISCUSS THIS IN PUBLIC. PLEASE COME DIRECTLY TO THE OFFICE.
Outside the café a delivery truck reversed with three sharp beeps. Mira looked up and suddenly felt as though the whole ordinary world had become an assembly of signals she could not decipher.
“Are we in danger?” she asked.
Caleb did not pretend the answer was simple. “We're taking precautions. You are not responsible for what adults choose to do.”
“Then why am I the one who has to testify?”
“Because you remember what happened to you. And because someone ought to listen.”
On their way to the Metro station, her phone lit up with a message from a number she did not recognize.
STOP USING THE RED NOTEBOOK. ASK WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FIRST COPY.
There was no signature.
CHAPTER 04
The First Copy
Rebecca Cho's office occupied the second floor of a narrow brick building above a bicycle shop. Its conference room held six mismatched chairs, two plants that seemed to disagree about sunlight, and a whiteboard covered with dates. Rebecca was thirty-eight, wore bright red glasses, and had a habit of answering frightening information by asking boring practical questions.
“Did you click anything?” she asked after examining the message on Mira's phone.
“No.”
“Did you reply?”
“No.”
“Excellent. We're going to preserve it and ask the security team to assess whether it's connected to the case. It may be a warning. It may be an attempt to frighten you. We don't assign it a meaning before we have evidence.”
Mira liked her immediately.
Caleb described the incident on Flight 618. Rebecca wrote a chronology that began with the boarding pass and ended with Price's remark about missing district data. She asked Mira to correct anything that sounded wrong. When Mira said she couldn't remember whether he had said “original data” or “original school data,” Rebecca struck through the quotation marks.
“Uncertainty belongs in an honest record,” she explained.
Mira remembered making the complaint packet at the public library. The copier had swallowed the last of her mother's coins, and Marisol was not there; a different librarian had helped her clear the jam. Mira had lined up her pages on a long wooden table, checking names against permission slips and blacking out the details of students whose parents wanted anonymity. Some pages contained only dates and descriptions of meetings. Others included short sentences from students who felt their teachers had stopped looking them in the eye. She had bound the pages with a rubber band because she couldn't afford a folder. When she brought the packet to school, the secretary stamped a receipt and said somebody would respond within ten business days. Nobody did.
She had assumed silence meant the packet sat unread in a drawer. The possibility that it had traveled farther than she ever had was unsettling. A sheet of paper, she realized, could move through offices without the person who wrote it ever being invited inside.
At the conference table sat another person Mira hadn't met: a software analyst named Dr. Farah Malik. Farah had once designed school attendance tools and now evaluated claims about automated decision systems. She explained that Harborlight wasn't a single clever machine. It was a collection of datasets, rules, statistical models, and human decisions wrapped in marketing about prediction.
“The word automatic can hide a lot of hands,” Farah said.
They showed Mira two versions of a student report. The first was from October, when Samira had been flagged as high concern. The second was a district export created the previous week. Both contained the same final risk label. Only the newer export omitted the record of who approved it.
“If the final decision is unchanged,” Mira asked, “why remove the name?”