The hum of the office was background noise to her thoughts.
Aika sat at her desk, eyes glued to the screen, but her mind had never wandered so far from a spreadsheet before. Ren's desk remained empty. His absence still pressed at the back of her mind like a slow-forming bruise—dull at first, but deepening by the minute.
She'd already retraced his last known tasks. According to the logs, he was in the office yesterday. The timestamp on the folder he uploaded to the confidential channel was from late evening two night ago—well past working hours. Typical of Ren. Always quietly persistent.
She opened the file he had sent.
A simple title: Audit_LevelX_Internal
Her cursor hovered. A flick of unease spread through her spine.
She clicked.
It was a compressed package, encrypted with the secure key she'd given him. She decrypted it, eyes narrowing as the contents populated on her screen.
Six folders.
One marked "suspicious_vendor_profiles".
Another, "inaccessible_transaction_paths".
Then "time-discrepancy_logs".
And one titled:
Potential Blacksite
Aika's heart stuttered. Her chair creaked as she leaned forward.
She opened the last one.
The first document was a series of flagged network pings and inconsistent access records—linked to a facility address located far from the city core. It wasn't a regular company-owned warehouse. According to the internal records, it was tagged as obsolete inventory holding. But here… Ren had included screenshots, log data, ping traces, employee swipe reports that shouldn't exist.
One name kept appearing in the reports: S. Kuroda — a senior logistics manager she'd already flagged in previous corruption files. Ren had cross-referenced everything: fuel receipts, van movements, employee ID scans that didn't align with the official schedules.
The deeper she dove, the faster her fingers flew over the keys.
Another folder revealed invoices from non-existent vendors—payments routed through a shell supplier, then rerouted to employee accounts and corporate cards under ghost IDs.
Ren had untangled a spiderweb.
Aika's breath caught as she reached a timestamped image log.
It was grainy but showed a person in a wheelchair passing through a restricted hallway. Ren. The file ended abruptly with a corrupted log.
Her jaw clenched. She closed the image, heart now racing. She clicked into a compiled note document. Ren's own annotations filled the page, quick and sparse:
"This isn't just money laundering."
"Possible unregistered site—tracking blackout zone."
"If you're reading this… I found something big."
The cursor blinked at the end of that last sentence.
Aika sat frozen.
Then her instincts roared.
She yanked her phone from her desk, opened the security line, and keyed in the highest-level access to cross-verify the warehouse location. The system spat back minimal results. Even her credentials were throttled.
She rose from her chair.
Pacing. Thinking. Replaying his calm voice explaining line items just days ago. Replaying how he refused to meet her eyes. How his hands trembled ever so slightly during break when he said he might have found something.
She'd missed it.
And now… he was gone.
Aika reopened the spreadsheet and began scanning the rest—furious now. She pulled up the full address Ren had identified and plotted it on her map. It was a dead zone. Satellite data was grainy. There were no regular shipments. But a small security note Ren added caught her eye:
"Electromagnetic deadfield spike noted in security logs 3 days ago. Possible signal scrambler active."
Her gut twisted.
Aika grabbed her notepad, scribbled the address, then highlighted a footnote Ren had marked: "If this van ID returns twice in under 6 hours—flag."
She cross-referenced it with a file she'd had open for another case. The van had returned. Exactly 5 hours and 47 minutes apart. No official reason.
Her fingers flew.
Ren had been trying to warn her. No. He had warned her.
And now, everything was pointing to one place. One derelict warehouse. Hidden beneath corrupted reports, buried under mountains of redacted data… and all of it led back to the hands of the most powerful department heads in the company.
But this wasn't about them anymore.
This was about Ren.
And she knew—down to the edge of her breath—that if she didn't act fast, the trail might vanish forever.
Her eyes returned to the spreadsheet one last time.
Then she whispered, almost like a promise, "Hold on… just a little longer."
Aika has found the breadcrumbs Ren left behind. But the trail leads into shadows no one wants to enter. Will she go alone?