Chapter 5

The smell of industrial bleach and scorched broth clung to the walls of the community kitchen, a sharp contrast to the sterile, climate-controlled detention room where corporate security had held me just hours ago. Once the external oversight agency triggered the six-hour server hold, Elliott’s security team had no legal grounds to detain me without formal police charges. I had walked out of the building with raw wrists and a suspended mediator license, using my last unmonitored transit credits to cross into the city's outer district. I tracked down the geolocation coordinates Sami had embedded in the leaked audit file.