CHAPTER 103: MINUTE 27 (THE LIVING RECORD)

CHAPTER 103: MINUTE 27 (THE LIVING RECORD)
The bunker reeked of ozone, cold metal, and the sour tang of Marco’s sweat—he hadn't moved from his chair in six hours. When I stepped inside, the air felt like it had been vacuumed out of the room. I slammed my bag onto the steel table with a crash that made Marco jump. My hand went straight for my jacket’s inner pocket. I pulled out Fauna’s thumb drive—that scrap of gray plastic that somehow weighed more than my own soul—and dropped it beside the keyboard.

—Marco. Now —was all I could manage. My throat felt like it was full of sand, and the metallic taste of fear was still glued to my palate.

Marco didn’t ask questions. His fingers, which usually danced over the keys with a pianist’s grace, were trembling. He plugged it in. The hum of the servers seemed to pitch higher, as if the R-Δ system were screaming from somewhere deep within the network. On the main monitor, a loading bar began to crawl. Slow. Agonizing.

—Fauna called this the "living part" —I whispered, shucking off my jacket. My white T-shirt was stained with god-knows-what—. She said the code forgets what the physical record remembers.

—It’s encrypted with Level 5 keys —Marco said, his eyes locked on the scrolling lines of code—. But Fauna left a backdoor open for me. It’s an old-school admin bypass. Entering in three, two, one…

The screen went black for a heartbeat before exploding into a cascade of folders. These weren't the tidy, aseptic files from the Technical Office. These were scans of handwritten notes, audio recordings choked with static, and photographs that had never touched the city’s PR filters.

Marco opened the folder labeled: CASE FILE 27-C / COSTANERA B.

The first thing to appear was a high-resolution photo. It wasn't the image of the broken scaffolding we’d seen in the papers. It was a shot from the ground, looking up. You could see the metal structure twisted like the skeleton of a giant. And there, in the bottom margin, was a red smear that the VENTO software had scrubbed from the official versions. Blood. Fresh blood on poorly cured concrete.

—Look at the metadata, Valen —Marco pointed to a text box in the corner—. Capture Time: 14:42. Operator: S. Belmonte. Material Status: Structural fatigue due to supply skimming.

I clicked to the next image. A scanned document. An inspection report bearing the Belmonte Construction seal. In the list of responsible parties, the names lined up like a row of executioners: Santiago Belmonte, the prosecution’s auditor, and a representative from Moretti Logistics. But the name that stopped my heart was at the very bottom, in the column for "Personnel Involved in Incident."

HÉCTOR SERRANO. Category: Liability to be neutralized.

I felt an electric jolt at the base of my brain. Liability to be neutralized. He wasn't a worker. He wasn't a father. He was a negative digit on a spreadsheet that someone had decided to delete so the balance sheet would stay in the green.

—Here’s the key, Valen —Marco opened a text file titled VENTO Tagging Protocol—. Listen to this: "In the event of structural collapse due to Grade C material deficiency, the system will automatically apply the 'HUMAN ERROR' tag to avoid triggering civil or criminal liability clauses. Photographic annexes will be routed to Directory 5 for logical purging."

—It wasn’t a mistake —my voice came out as a broken whisper—. It wasn’t that he forgot to hook his harness. It wasn’t that he slipped. The system already had a name for the lie before he even hit the ground.

Marco kept scrolling, opening folders of invoices. "Supply skimming" wasn't an abstract concept. It was tons of steel that were logged as purchased but ended up in a black market at the docks. It was low-grade cement billed as premium. Santiago Belmonte hadn’t just built the Costanera; he’d built a death trap and charged the State for every defective nail.

—Confirmed —Marco said, with a coldness that gave me chills—. The "maneuver" was to divert 30% of the safety budget into an offshore account for Austral Logistics. They used your old man as the scapegoat for a multi-million dollar swindle.

I stared at my father’s name on the screen. Héctor Serrano. There he was, surrounded by barcodes and signatures from men in suits. In that moment, something inside my chest—something I’d kept under lock and key with sarcasm, journalism, and bitter coffee for years—simply snapped.

It wasn't a clean break. There was no poetry in my grief, no metaphors of rain against the glass. It was an explosion of pure, ugly, human rage.

I bolted upright so fast I sent my chair flying backward. I grabbed the coffee mug on the table—one of those Milano mugs Piero had given me—and shattered it against the concrete wall. The crash of breaking glass wasn't enough. I started screaming, but it wasn't a sob; it was a wounded animal’s roar.

—Those sons of bitches! —I yelled, slamming my clenched fists against the steel table until my knuckles burned—. They killed him for a profit margin! They turned him into a fucking clerical error!

Marco stood up, startled, trying to put a hand on my shoulder, but I shoved him away. I was blind with fury. I started sweeping papers off the table, kicking the servers, discharging years of an absence they’d sold me as an accident. My father hadn't died by fate; he’d died by an administrative decision. They’d murdered him in an air-conditioned office with a "modernization" smile.

I slumped to the floor, falling to my knees among the shards of the broken mug. I didn't cry like a novel's heroine; I was gasping, my face flushed and my fingers stained with a mix of dust and blood from my own knuckles. The bunker, which had felt like a sanctuary before, now felt like the cell where the truth had been imprisoned.

—Valen… stop. You have to see this —Marco’s voice was small, almost terrified.

I forced myself to breathe, swallowing the stale air. I got up from the floor, wiping my face with my sleeve. I looked back at the screen. Marco had opened the last document on the drive, the one Fauna had marked with a red padlock. It was the final approval log for the "Neutralization of Liability Serrano."

The document had to be validated by three parties: the builder (Belmonte), the insurer (Moretti), and the "Media Veracity Advisor."

My eyes dropped to the final digital signature. The name glowed on the screen with obscene clarity. I felt my stomach flip—a physical wave of nausea that forced me to lean on the table to keep from collapsing again.

—It can’t be —I whispered, my heart hammering against my ribs—. Not him.

The digital signature belonged to the man who had taught me how to write. To the man who had given me my first break. To the man who told me, every single morning, that journalism was the only light in the dark.

RAÚL RAMÍREZ. Editor-in-Chief - The Urban Spectator.

Beneath his signature, a brief, typewritten comment: "News cycle finalized. Human error narrative maintained to protect Modernization ad-spend. Payment received in bridge account."

The bunker turned ice-cold. Ramírez hadn’t just known what happened to my father; he had been the architect of the silence that buried him. My mentor, my ally, the man who was "helping" me investigate, was the same man who had cashed a check to sell my father's death as a lapse in judgment.

—Valen? —Marco looked at me, and for the first time, I saw real fear in his eyes—. Ramírez is calling the watch.

I looked at the device on the table. The green light was pulsing rhythmically. Ramírez’s name was flashing on the screen—the man who was probably listening to everything from the other side, the man who had sent us to the slaughterhouse to see if we could scrub his own trail.

I squeezed the 100-coin in my pocket. The cold metal felt like a knife. There were no more allies. No more sanctuaries. We were alone in a city that fed on its own children.

—Don’t answer —I said, and my voice was no longer that of a frightened journalist, but of someone who had just discovered the entire world was a lie—. Marco, make a hard copy of this. Now. We’re getting out of here before he sends someone to finish Belmonte’s job.

The sun was rising over San Avelino, just as filthy as ever. But this time, the traitor wasn't in the palace; he was sitting in my boss's chair.