The Foundry runs on other people's joy. All night the machines hum, pulling the happiest hour out of each seller. By dawn the canisters land on Mara's desk, warm and faintly glowing. Her job is simple: scan, log, shelve, forget. She's done it for six years. Tonight a canister rolls down the chute with a name printed on the side. Her name. Mara Vance.

Mara doesn't scan it. She slides the canister into her coat and keeps working, logging the others like nothing happened. The cameras blink red in the corners. If anyone checks the count tonight, one canister will be missing, and it'll have her name on it.

The next morning Dell calls Mara into his office. The missing canister sits on his desk. They found it in her coat at the door scanner. 'You took something that isn't yours,' he says flatly. Mara almost laughs. 'It has my name on it.' Dell doesn't blink. 'Everything in this building has someone's name on it. That's the whole point.'

Dell offers Mara a quiet deal: forget tonight, keep her job, and he'll make sure her name never shows up on the chute again. Mara looks at the canister between them, then at the man who's filed away a thousand lives like hers. She takes the deal, and the canister, and spends every night after secretly copying files, building a case that will one day bury him.