At 3:17 a.m., Camellia stood alone in Phoenix’s restricted server wing, staring at a blinking cursor on a dark terminal.

if Echo51_triggered: burn_all_ledger_access_logs()

Someone had embedded the kill-switch beneath the transparency module.

If activated, it would erase Phoenix’s public trust—not by deleting the truth, but by erasing every record of it.

She plugged in her encrypted drive and began a trace.

The tag read: Davenport.

Camellia froze.

Davenport.

One of the original Phoenix encryption architects.

A man she had fired personally last year for suspicious access attempts during the Cassandra fallout.

He shouldn’t even be in the building.

Davenport stepped off a train at the Geneva private terminal, hooded, unshaved,...