The woman's name was Nessa Varr.
She had come to The Records because a man had handed her a document and she had signed it and three weeks later something felt wrong. She didn't know what. She just knew that the weight of the document in her bag had been getting heavier every day she carried it, and she'd seen a notice about The Records, and she'd come.
Her instincts were correct.
Adisa spent twenty minutes with the document. Tobias spent ten with the financial structure. I watched their faces.
"It's a direct copy," Tobias said. "The shell entity architecture, the compounding mechanism, the nominal terms that look reasonable on the surface — everything Crone built, replicated with different names."
"How close?" Draven said.
"Close enough to be plagiarism," Tobias said. "If financial
