Zane was a courier by trade—fast, precise, and proudly invisible. He carried other people’s secrets more often than parcels: contracts folded into cigarette boxes, flash drives taped under bike seats, a single crimson envelope once slipped into his gloved hand at a railyard. That night his load was ordinary enough—a leather-bound ledger, no markings, sent from a lawyer’s office in Sector 7 to an archivist in the Old Library. The sum paid was generous; the instruction, curiously strict: “Deliver in person. No substitutions. Do not open.”
“You left,” she said.