The walk to the elevator was silent, broken only by the rhythmic sound of Bruno's footsteps and the occasional rustle of papers under Michael's arm. Bruno seemed tense, his jaw clenched as he processed the idea that the unit was being watched from within.
"Michael," Bruno said, not taking his eyes off the elevator's metal doors. "Aren't you scared? I mean, we deal with a lot of things… but seeing our names in those folders…"
Michael stopped and looked at Bruno. He forced a slight tremor in the hand holding the folder—a tiny detail, but Bruno noticed it immediately.
"I'm terrified, Bruno," Michael lied, his voice dropping a notch, as if confessing a weakness. "But the Commander needs us to be his eyes now. If I let myself be carried away by fear, who's going to organize the chaos?"
Bruno nodded, feeling a pang of respect for the "fragile" archivist. He placed a hand on Michael's shoulder in a supportive gesture.
"You've got guts. Let's get this to the archive right away."
Celia and Owen were immersed in a symphony of clicks and codes. Foxy remained by the door, her coin now spinning between her fingers with aggressive speed.
"I got it," Owen exclaimed, swiveling his chair. "Salvatore was right about the code being 'surgical.' I traced the deletion command that wiped his firewalls. It didn 't come from outside, Celia."
Celia leaned over Owen's shoulder, her eyebrows furrowed.
"What do you mean 'didn't come from outside'?"
"The signal was mirrored. It looks like it came from a remote terminal, but the real origin…" Owen hesitated, swallowing hard. "The command pulse was triggered from inside the FBI network. And not from just any terminal. It came from a 'ghost' administrator-level access."
Foxy halted the coin in midair.
"A ghost who has the keys to the house."
"Michell!" Celia called the Commander, who was still watching the empty interrogation room through the glass. "We need to review every access protocol from the last six months. If Salvatore was the 'barrier,' whoever used that admin access is the 'flood.'"
While Bruno walked away to get a high-resolution scanner in another room, Michael was left alone among the towering shelves of documents. The silence there was absolute, a sanctuary of secrets no one else wanted to read.
Michael approached one of the folders Bruno had found. He opened the page containing the report on Michell's unit. With a pen whose ink was invisible to the human eye but reactive to specific frequencies, he made a small mark in the page footer.
"Julian Vane…" Michael whispered into the void. "You served well as a distraction, Salvatore. But the Void isn't a person. It's the absence of options I'll leave them."
He heard Bruno's footsteps returning. Instantly, Michael's expression of absolute coldness dissolved. His shoulders slumped slightly, his eyes regained that look of solicitous uncertainty.
"Did you find the scanner, Bruno?" Michael asked, with a light, weary smile.
"Yeah. Let's get started. The Commander wants this by yesterday."
Michael nodded, picking up the first sheet. He knew that by the end of that night, the files Bruno would scan wouldn't be exactly the same as the ones Salvatore had tried to hide. Michael wasn't just archiving history; he was rewriting the past so the future would unfold exactly as he had planned.
The game had changed. The FBI was no longer hunting criminals; they were hunting a shadow Michael had just projected on the wall, while the real monster held the flashlight.