Chapter 8: The Missing Annex
"Annex C is not in the corporate archive."
Nathan announced it the way you announce a verdict rather than a problem, as though a hole in your own filing system is a form of ownership.
Ms. Vale had pulled the digital contract set while Rhea was still presenting the original. The archive returned fourteen pages — the identical truncated version already sitting in every binder on that table.
No annexes. No seal record. No superseding instrument. No note explaining any of it.
Nathan asked for a private conference before anyone searched further. Anneke Sørensen said she would grant one the moment he identified a legal question that could not be discussed with the licensor's counsel present.
"Chain of custody."
"That's a question of fact," Rhea said. "You may have the room when you have a question of law."
Celeste pointed at the grey folder. "How do we know that wasn't assembled last month?"
It was, on its face, a fair question, and Rhea answered it the way you answer a fair question when you have been waiting for someone to ask it.
She gave Ms. Vale the name of the document examiner, the paper inventory, the ink analysis reference, and the seal log, and offered the whole folder for independent testing by a laboratory Sterling could choose from a list of four.
"Test it," she said. "We'll pay."
Anneke added authentication to the review order. My father disliked that intensely, and I understood why: there was no argument in it for him to defeat. It was simply a process, running, with nobody's hand on it.
"The old migrations were imperfect," Nathan said. "We merged three document systems in the two years after Helena died."
"Annex A and Annex B are also missing," Anneke said, without looking up from the index.
"Which is consistent with a scanning failure."
"Or with a decision," I said.
His eyes came across the table. "Do you have evidence of one?"
"I have evidence the complete agreement was in this building five years ago."
There was a grey tab in the packet in front of me marked HISTORICAL RIGHTS. I ordered those tabs. I remember ordering them, from a supplier in Leeds, the week before the first AURORA governance review, because the ones we had were the wrong height for the binders and it was bothering me.
And I carried the original corporate copy down to legal myself, eleven days after my mother's funeral, because Nathan had said — standing in my kitchen, holding a mug he'd made tea in and not drunk — that he was going to make certain nobody in that company confused grief with an opportunity.
The archive lobby on the fourth floor smelled of dust and new carpet; they'd laid it the month before. There's an intake terminal by the desk and he signed it while I stood there with my hands in my coat pockets. Then he kissed my forehead and told me to go back up to the laboratory, that I had a run going, that he would handle the paper.
For five years I remembered the kiss with much more clarity than the receipt.
That was the error, and it was mine, and I have stopped apologising to myself for it.
"I delivered thirty-one pages into the controlled archive," I said. "The receipt will carry my employee number."
Nathan folded his hands. "A personal recollection is not a record."
"Correct. So search the record."
Ms. Vale entered my old employee number, and the room waited, and this query took considerably longer than the others had.
Celeste paced behind her chair. The crown was on the table by then, next to a water glass, and without it she looked younger and substantially more dangerous. The ceremony had been built around applause. Nobody had written her anything for this.
"Even if a complete copy existed once," she said, "Evelyn had access to it. She could have removed it herself."
"I could have," I said.
She stopped, because agreement is the one response she has never had a plan for.
"That's what access logs are for. Pull mine. Pull all of mine."
Anneke ordered an immediate legal hold across the licence files, the board minutes, the archive histories, and the system migrations. Nathan objected to the breadth of it. Rhea carved patient material out of the first collection before he could get properly started, which removed his best objection and left him holding his second best.
"The hold needs to cover duplicate deletion logs," I said.
"You do not direct our systems team."
"No. The board is deciding what to preserve. I'm telling it which category of thing disappears on its own during ordinary maintenance, and then cannot be recovered, and then gets described as a scanning failure."
Anneke added deletion logs. Nathan wrote something on his pad and turned the page over before anyone at his end of the table could read it.
Ms. Vale's tablet chimed.
She read it without saying anything at all, which is how I knew.
"Well?" my father said.
"The receipt exists."
She mirrored it to the main monitor, and there it was in a font designed in 1998.
Date received: five years and nine months earlier.
Pages: thirty-one.
Delivered by: Evelyn Sterling.
Verified by: Records Control.
Nathan did not look at me and did not look at the screen. He looked at the middle distance above Ms. Vale's shoulder, which is where he looks when he is calculating.
"Open the custody history," I said.
Ms. Vale hesitated. "It includes legal department users."
"The chair has ordered a hold," Rhea said. "Metadata only. Don't open any privileged content and don't summarise it."
The early entries are unremarkable. Annual verification. A storage transfer in the second year. A digitisation check.
Then the week of the accident.
The complete file was checked out at 9:14 on the morning my laboratory access was suspended — seven hours before my father sent the message putting me on leave.
Not by me. My credentials never touched it.
My father leaned toward the screen and asked the question I had been waiting five years to hear somebody in his position ask out loud.
"Who had it?"
Ms. Vale scrolled to the final field.
Nathan had gone completely still, in the way that people do when they have known something for a long time and are about to watch other people learn it.
Custodian: N. Cole, Office of General Counsel.
Status: Not returned.