"Beware what you wish to find. The truth always arrives wearing a different name." — Anonymous
The Eastern European server was not hardened the way a receiving end should be.
It was hardened the way an origin point is—from the inside out, protecting what it contained rather than what it was receiving. Thorne's files weren't being deposited there. They had been there first, waiting to be routed toward him. The directionality was wrong. I had assumed a transaction moving outward. What I found was a feed moving inward.
The distinction took me forty minutes to trust and another twenty to verify.
The server was a drop point. Someone upstream was providing Thorne with the Sterling Industries R&D files, and Thorne was washing the money through his shell architecture in the opposite direction—payment for delivery, not sale. He wasn't selling Julian's secrets to an outside buyer. He was being paid to receive them and move them somewhere Julian couldn't trace.
Thorne wasn't the principal.
Thorne was the pipeline.
I sat with that for a moment the way you sit with a variable that changes the shape of every equation that contains it. Then I went deeper.
The upstream origin was layered behind three additional routing nodes, each one cleaner than the last, which is the inverse of how amateur networks operate and the calling card of infrastructure built by someone who understood forensic architecture at a level that should have made them harder to find. They weren't harder to find. They were harder to recognize, which is a different discipline entirely.
I recognized it.
Because I had built something similar, once, four years ago, for a client I had never met and never questioned because the payment arrived in a format that was technically unimpeachable.
My fingers stopped.
The architecture I was looking at was not similar to something I had built. It was the thing I had built. The same structural logic, the same specific routing idiosyncrasies, the same timestamp normalization method that I had developed as a proprietary technique and had used exactly once.
Someone had taken a system I built and turned it back toward me.
I opened a new working window. Ran the comparison manually, node by node. The match held at every point of verification. There was no charitable interpretation.
I kept going, because stopping would have meant confronting what this implied before I had enough information to respond to it.
At the fourth routing layer, buried behind a credential wall that took the server's processor eleven minutes to crack, was a directory. Not labeled with a company name or a code designation. Labeled with a string I recognized as my own shorthand—the kind of abbreviation system I had used in my private operational notes since I was twenty-two years old and had never shared with anyone.
The directory was labeled: A.V. / ARCHIVE / DO NOT OPEN UNTIL READY.
My initials. My phrase. The exact phrase I wrote in the margin of my working file, three hours ago, when I had catalogued the OBSERVER_ZERO partition and decided to leave it alone.
I opened the directory.
It contained a single file. A dossier. Detailed, comprehensive, dated from a point three years before Julian Sterling had ever become a name on a contract.
The subject of the dossier was me.
I read it twice. Not because it was long. Because the first time through, my pattern-recognition kept stopping at individual data points and refusing to process them as a set.
The dossier documented my professional history with the kind of precision that should not have been possible from any external vantage point. Operational details. Network architectures. The names and locations of safe houses I had maintained for periods as short as three weeks. Payment methods I had used once and abandoned. The client on a job in 2021 who I had never met, never traced, and whose cryptocurrency wallet I had never been able to locate. The file listed the wallet's seed phrase.
Someone had been watching me work for three years.
Not Julian. The dossier predated any reasonable connection to Sterling Industries.
Someone else.
And they had left this file here—in a server connected to Thorne's operation, inside a directory labeled in my own private shorthand, with a note that said not to open it until I was ready—in a place they could only have placed it if they had known I would eventually be inside this room, in this building, with access to this specific network.
The last page of the dossier was blank except for a single line of text, left-aligned, in a monospaced font:
You were always going to open this door, Anya. I simply helped you find it faster.
No signature. No contact method. No further text.
I closed the file. Sat for several minutes with my hands flat on the desk. Then I got up and went to find Julian Sterling.