She led us through the inner door. I told Rowan to wait at the threshold; he nodded and took the angle that let him see both corridor and lab.
Inside, machines hummed at polite intervals. Evelyn crossed straight to a console and pulled up graphs that looked like they belonged in a textbook—pretty curves, elegant stability, a green band of “within tolerance.”
“Calibration drift,” she narrated, fingers moving with confident economy. “Point zero three at nineteen-hundred hours. I isolated the reservoir and rebalanced input. Drift corrected. The contaminated string”—she tapped— “was removed to prevent cascade. Fresh aliquot replaced, verified.”
“Who flagged the drift?”
“I did,” she said. “We’ve set triple redundancy since the last advisory.”
“And who authorized deleting the ‘contaminated
