Still, Helen needed proof—something irrefutable. When her second archive request was also ignored, she went to a decommissioned plant records office that stored unsorted boxes from the 2008 project. The air smelled of damp paper and dust. A clerk shrugged. “If his file survived the storage fire, it’s in there somewhere.”
In a forgotten cabinet, she found a folder, edges brittle and browned. The tab read: Ward, C. Inside lay fragments of his original proposal, stamped Withdrawn — Incomplete Data / Industrial NDA. A sketch survived. It was a hand-drawn map, fault lines circled in red.