Chương 214: Chapter 205 - Concordance

The wait stretched out for what felt considerably longer than it actually was. Thirty minutes, by my interface's count. Thirty minutes of sitting at the kitchen table, leg bouncing, glass of water going warm and then getting replaced with a fresh glass that also went warm, my mind cycling through an increasingly elaborate series of worst-case scenarios that I was fully aware were the product of an overstressed imagination and yet could not seem to stop generating.

'What if someone tracked the shard? What if Vorpal has some kind of recovery protocol on it? What if the Scavs who had the safehouse weren't just squatters—what if they were deliberately placed there to entice a nosy Operator in finding the shard? What if Daven's was being watched, maybe even followed, and I just walked his paper trail straight into my own neck…?' None of it seemed particularly likely. Most of it was borderline paranoid, I knew.

But that was the thing about carrying around genocide-weapon documentation—it had a bit of a habit of recalibrated your baseline for "reasonable concern" pretty dramatically, I found. I'd become noticeably more paranoid over the last hour. I was aware of it, and I didn't particularly like it, but I also couldn't entirely fault the instinct. Some situations earned paranoia.

'And if this one doesn't… Then what would ever count?' Suddenly, the biometric lock at the front door chimed. I was out of the chair and half into a combat stance before I'd consciously registered moving.

One hand slapped down onto the Kinetic Dampening Mask sitting on the table in front of me—not that a KDM would do much against whatever a corporation might send after a shard like this, but the reflex was there—and the other went straight to the handle of Takeda's katana where it leaned against the table, thumb settling against the guard, ready to draw in a single clean motion.

My weight dropped low, my breathing shifted, and every bit of the morning's [Acrobatics] and combat training coiled up in my body all at once, primed to move. The door slid open— —and Valeria stepped through. I let out a long, slow breath and forced my hand off the katana, straightening back up out of the ready stance.

'… Just Valeria. Obviously it's just Valeria. She literally just messaged you that she was coming. Get it together, Sera...' Yeah… I had definitely become quite a bit more paranoid than was strictly healthy. I'd been sitting here imagining every possible catastrophe the shard could invite through that door, and my brain had apparently decided to treat the expected, announced arrival of my own mother as a potential ambush. I'd be very glad to put all of this behind me, and soon.

Valeria took in the scene in a single sweeping glance—me in full Ela Operator gear, one hand still on the mask, the katana within immediate reach, my posture only just now settling out of a combat-ready crouch. Her gray-steel eyes catalogued all of it with the efficient, unhurried precision she catalogued everything with, and one of her eyebrows rose a fraction of a degree.

"Seraphine," she said, by way of greeting, as the door sealed shut behind her.

"Mother." I straightened fully, and though I was standing there dressed head-to-toe as Ela, my mind was decidedly, firmly in Sera mode the moment I opened my mouth to her. The gear was Ela's. The persona I was speaking from was decidedly not.

"Thank you for coming. I know it's—""You will explain," Valeria said, cutting cleanly through the pleasantry as she crossed the room toward the table.

"I have left a scheduled negotiation to be here. I did so on the strength of a deliberately vague message and a track record I have decided to trust. You will now tell me what I have rearranged my workday for and why my trust has not been wastefully misplaced." She set her datapad down on the counter, turned to face me fully, and folded her hands in front of her—and I noted, with a small breath of elation, that her right side actually seemed to be somewhat moving again.

Not particularly well or in large movements, but even folding her hands had been beyond her for the past few days. For the briefest of moments—genuinely just a flicker—a small, opportunistic part of my brain surfaced and wondered whether there was leverage to be had here. Whether I could parlay the shard's value into concessions before handing it over. Information was currency, after all, and this was the single most valuable piece of information I'd ever held—possibly ever would hold.

But I threw the idea out almost as fast as it appeared.

'No. Absolutely not. This isn't the time.' This shard was too far above my paygrade. Possibly even above hers, honestly. She was already doing me an enormous favor by taking it off my hands—assuming this risk, this liability, this weight —and trying to squeeze concessions out of that would be both pettily stupid and profoundly short-sighted. And besides—strangely enough—I genuinely trusted Valeria to be fair, at this point.

If this shard ended up furthering her corporate standing in some way, I had very little doubt she'd dole out an appropriate share of the reward without me having to extract it from her in advance. That was just how she seemed to operate. Cold, transactional and exacting—but ultimately fair. So instead of negotiating, I reached up, unslotted the shard from my neck-slot, and slid it across the table toward her.

"I'd rather show you than try to describe it," I said.

"But I'll give you the context first." Valeria's eyes dropped to the shard, then rose back to me. She didn't reach for it yet.

"I found it on a job," I continued.

"Not looking for it—it came off the same outing as some other salvage. It's a personal log, from a Vorpal Dynamics procurement coordinator. The log itself is mostly just a scared man documenting things he probably shouldn't have. But there are technical documents attached to it. Material specification sheets tied to a procurement pipeline he was signing off on." Something in Valeria's expression sharpened around the edges.

The name Vorpal Dynamics had clearly registered, and the phrase material specification sheets had registered even harder.

"I had it inspected," I went on.

"By a contact I trust. Someone who knows materials. I made it very clear they could decline to look, given what it might involve—and they chose to look anyway, and then strongly wished they hadn't." I met her eyes directly.

"They were more than forthcoming afterward. Their recommendation, without any hesitation, was that I destroy it as soon as possible and forget it ever existed. That I not carry it, not store it, not hand it to anyone through normal channels. That was the immediate, unambiguous advice." I paused, choosing the next words carefully.

"I'm not going to tell you the specifics of what's on it before you look, because I want you to reach your own conclusion without me coloring it. But I will tell you this much—my contact mentioned a registry of sorts. Something called the Concordance-list, specifically. I don't really know what it is, but it sounded important enough to mention. Their reaction to one particular entry on those sheets was the single most serious I've ever seen from them.

"That's why I didn't take this to an OPN broker—it seemed too important for that. And I want to be clear, Mother: I am entirely willing to destroy the shard and pretend it never existed, if that's your assessment of the situation. That was my contact's recommendation, and I don't take it lightly. But I figured that, given your career, there might be something you could actually do about it instead.

Some way this information could get into the right hands before those materials are used for whatever they're going to be used for." Valeria was very still now. The Concordance-list, whatever its full weight, had clearly landed. Her gaze had gone distant and calculating, the way it did when she was rapidly reassessing a situation against a much larger internal map than I had access to—likely running implications, connections, consequences that existed entirely within the corporate world she navigated.

After a few pregnant seconds of silence, Valeria spoke.

"You brought it here. To me. Rather than to a broker, or to your Face, or destroying it as you were advised." Her eyes came back to mine, hard and focused.

"Why me, specifically, Seraphine? Walk me through your thought-process in more detail."

"Because a broker sells to the highest bidder," I replied immediately.

"And the highest bidder for this might be the exact people it implicates—who would then have every reason to bury it, along with everyone who ever touched it. Because destroying it felt like letting something genuinely monstrous just… disappear, unaccounted for. And because you're the only person I have access to who might actually understand how these things are supposed to be handled. Who also potentially has the standing to route it somewhere it can't be quietly made to vanish.

And who has every personal reason in the world to make sure none of it traces back to this household." Something moved behind Valeria's eyes at that last part—approval, maybe? Or simple recognition that I'd reasoned it through adequately enough for her. Either way, I felt a weight roll off my shoulders that I hadn't even fully realized was sitting there.

"That last consideration," she said quietly, "is the one that matters most, and I am mildly surprised you led with the others."

"I was trying to be thorough, Mother." The faintest thing—not quite a smile, barely the ghost of one—touched the corner of her mouth for half a second before her expression resettled into its usual composed neutrality. Then, finally, she reached out and picked up the shard.

"Very well," she said.

"Let us see what my trust has purchased." Valeria took the shard and slotted it into her datapad, then immediately began tapping through a rapid series of commands I couldn't see from my angle. Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Some kind of diagnostic sweep, almost certainly. Running the shard through whatever suite of analysis tools a corporate executive kept on hand for exactly this sort of thing.

She hummed briefly partway through, then looked up at me.

"I am not particularly pleased," she said, "that you slotted this into your neck." I shifted a bit awkwardly on my chair. I didn't bother restraining my muscles to keep still about it, either, because there really wasn't any way out of this one.

"I trust you performed at least some level of diligent pre-checking," she continued, eyes returning to the datapad.

"However, given the level of request you have made of me previously regarding your Netrunning capabilities, I doubt those checks were adequate for something of this apparent significance."

"… They weren't," I admitted with a bit of a cringe.

"I spooled up an isolated partition and loaded it there. That's… the extent of what I know how to do."

"Mm." That really was the extent of it. Make a partition, hope it holds, cross your fingers. It was something I'd been meaning to properly address but there were simply too many things demanding my attention and not nearly enough hours to distribute across all of them. And I hadn't exactly anticipated stumbling into a shard that might warrant high-end forensic analysis when I'd picked it up off a Scav safehouse floor. Valeria huffed once.

"I shall procure a shard for you," she said evenly.

"Fundamentals of media sanitization and digital forensic isolation. You will consider it partial repayment for this, and an investment in your future competence. Both descriptions are accurate."

"Thank you," I said, eyes slightly widened. I had not expected her to offer something like this, right from the get-go. That was going to be enormously useful. She acknowledged it with the barest nod, attention already back on the datapad. A few more minutes passed in silence. I watched her work, my leg starting up its bouncing again under the table. Finally, her eyes lifted back to mine.

"You have been very fortunate, Seraphine," she said.

"This shard is, in fact, clean. Entirely so." Her head tilted slightly and something faintly incredulous colored the edge of her tone as she added, " Somehow." Then she tapped through to the contents and began to read. And at first—nothing happened. I almost held my breath, watching her face for any flicker of reaction and getting absolutely nothing back. Just the smooth, composed neutrality she wore like a second skin, eyes tracking steadily across the display.

'Please let Misha not have blown this out of proportion. Please let this actually be worth interrupting her day for...' The thought spiraled fast.

'Because if it isn't, then I've just burned the one real chance I had at establishing that when I escalate something to her, it matters. That's not a card I get to play twice...' It wasn't that I didn't trust Misha, or her expertise—I trusted both completely. My concern was narrower than that: Whether Valeria would share Misha's read on just how problematic those specific materials actually were. Because when it came to Corpos, it was genuinely difficult to gauge where their pain points sat.

What registered as a five-alarm crisis to one party could be a routine Tuesday to another, depending entirely on which agreements they were signatory to, which rivals they were feuding with, and which lines they'd privately decided were worth crossing. Misha's horror had been visceral and, most importantly, personal. Valeria operated in a different world with a very different set of thresholds, and I had no way of knowing, going in, whether those thresholds would line up at all.

But, thankfully, after a few moments Valeria's face started to emote. Which was, in itself, absolutely stunning to witness. First, her brows drew together—a slow, gradual furrow as her eyes moved rapidly down the display. By the pattern of movement, she was working through the journal entries first, and her expression turned increasingly disbelieving with each one.

The look of a woman reading something that she was fairly sure could not possibly be as poorly handled as it appeared to be, and finding that it was, in fact, exactly that poorly handled.

'Yeah… Same here.' She reached the end of the log, tapped once, and opened the attached files. And her face turned to stone. Every trace of expression drained out of it at once, leaving something flat, hard and entirely unreadable—except for her eyes, which had gone sharp and dangerous in a way I had genuinely never seen before. She simply stared at the list. For a long, long while. I watched her eyes track down the specification sheets, reach the bottom, and then start over from the top. And again.

Reading and re-reading, several times through, the way someone did when the information in front of them refused to reconcile with their understanding of how the world was supposed to work. Finally, she set the datapad down on the table. Her face had returned to its usual composed mask by the time she looked up at me—but her eyes hadn't caught up yet. They were uncharacteristically emotive, and what they were showing was neither anger nor alarm.

It was deep, genuine confusion, tangled up with something considerably closer to concern.

"I am glad you brought this to me," Valeria said, and there was a weight behind the words that made it clear she wasn't offering a courtesy.

"This is, without question, far above what you could possibly handle on your own. You made the correct decision." She folded her hands in front of herself again and tilted her head slightly, considering.

"I am going to have to get this properly analyzed and verified," she continued, slowly.

"The manner in which the creator of this shard obtained the information—and then simply left it lying around —is… beyond questionable from an InfoSec standpoint. It should not be possible. Not with materials of this nature in play… Information like this does not survive contact with reality in this state. It is compartmentalized, encrypted, siloed, and buried under a dozen layers of deniability, or it does not exist at all." Her brow tightened.

"And yet here it is, somehow. Plaintext on a consumer-grade shard..." Then she turned serious in a way that made me almost flinch—her eyes coming up to meet mine with that sharp, dangerous edge from before.

"Can you truly trust the person you had analyze this?"

"Yes," I said, without hesitation.

"Completely." Her eyes bored into mine, searching for something. I held her gaze and let her look, because there was nothing to find except the truth. The seconds stretched long. Finally, however, she nodded once, seemingly having found what she'd been searching for.

"Very well. I will trust your judgment on this. You have earned as much." Coming from Valeria, that was not a small thing to say at all and I had to school my expression to not reveal my abject surprise at that.

'I'd honestly been half-prepared to throw down for Misha here… But I'll take the easy route on this one when offered.' Valeria, meanwhile, glanced back down at the datapad, took a breath, and then—to my mild surprise—actually circled back to elucidate me on something I'd admitted to not knowing earlier.

"You mentioned you did not know what the Concordance-list is," she said.

"It is, in the simplest terms, an agreement. A binding one, between all the corporations that remained standing after the last great war. An agreement to outright ban certain materials, and to persecute—mercilessly, and by mutual enforcement—anyone found in violation of it." Her eyes flicked up briefly.

"It is one of the very few things the major players genuinely agree on, which should tell you something about its seriousness."

"What kind of materials?" I asked, curiosity winning out.

"Two categories, broadly. The first: Materials whose only realistic applications lead to catastrophic weaponry. Nothing dual-use, nothing salvageable—substances that exist solely to kill at scale. The second: Materials so inherently volatile and dangerous that even their legitimate, beneficial uses cannot possibly outweigh the risk they pose if misused.

The list is short, absolute, and every signatory corporation enforces it against every other, because the alternative is mutual annihilation, as has been seen several times before." She tapped the datapad once.

"The material flagged on this shard falls into a particularly severe part of that second category. It is, effectively, a bioagent. A programmable one at that—capable of being keyed to target nearly any biomarker you could conceive of. It was last deployed during the Gryplik Extermination Wars." Something flickered across her face at that, gone almost before I saw it—far too fast for me to analyze.

"It has, sadly, a truly enormous potential for medical applications… The same mechanism that makes it a genocide weapon makes it a theoretically perfect targeted additive to just about any medicine or medical technology you could imagine. But the danger its mere existence poses—as demonstrated quite thoroughly during the war—is simply too horrific for it to be permitted to exist under any circumstances. So it does not."' Greywake,' I thought, the pieces locking together with everything Misha had told me.

'She's describing Greywake…'

"And Vorpal Dynamics," Valeria continued, her voice cooling further, "has apparently not only somehow located a supplier for its precursor, but successfully imported it into Neo Avalis… Without even the barest, most rudimentary attempt at operational security." She shook her head slowly.

"That is what concerns me most, Seraphine. Not that a corporation might violate the Concordance-list—corporations violate everything, eventually, if the incentive is large enough... But that they would do so this openly, this carelessly … That is what I struggle to believe."

"You think it might be fake," I said, seeing where she was going with this. I'd considered that possibility myself, of course—the thought that the whole thing was too clumsy, too convenient, too findable to be real. But without any realistic way to verify the information on my own end, handing it to Valeria had still been my best available option regardless of which way it broke. Real or fake, she was the right, and only, person to make that determination.

"I think it is more likely a fabrication than the truth," she confirmed with a terse nod.

"A false-flag plant or a trap designed to be found, to either implicate Vorpal Dynamics in something they did not do, or catch leaks inside their operations—if it truly is from Vorpal Dynamics itself. I give either of those scenarios considerably higher odds than Vorpal Dynamics genuinely breaking Concordance rules this brazenly, because the latter simply should not be possible … The enforcement mechanisms are too severe. Not to mention, no board would ever authorize it.

No executive would survive signing off on it." She breathed out slowly, downright deflating as she did so.

"And yet. I will prepare for both outcomes. Because if it is real, the implications are— significant. In every direction." Just as she finished her train of thought, her datapad chimed. She clicked her tongue, glancing at it, and something in her posture shifted back toward her professional register.

"I am needed back at work," she said, already sliding the shard into a secure compartment on the datapad's edge, before getting up from her chair.

"But I will reiterate once more, for posterity's sake—I am glad I made the time for this. You did well, Seraphine. Truly." Her eyes met mine.

"I encourage you to reach out to me for matters like this again in the future. You escalated correctly, and at the right moment. I will not forget this." I'd followed her toward the door as we talked, and she paused at the threshold, one hand near the frame." If this is verified as genuine," she added, almost as an afterthought—though nothing Valeria said was ever truly an afterthought, "then this shard may prove to be a foundational piece of intelligence for Ether Labs.

Something that could play a major role in the corporation's future. If that turns out to be the case…" She looked back at me, and there was the faint, precise ghost of approval in her eyes.

"Then your share of what I receive will be substantial. This, I promise, Seraphine. You have done well."

"Thank you," I said quietly, unsure of what to even say to all of this or how to react. Without any further words, the door slid shut behind her, leaving me standing a few meters from it in the sudden quiet of the empty apartment…