The Bureau gave Mira one job: erase General Vael Tisseren from the world's memory. Forty years of his crimes sat in her terminal, ready to delete. But the machine didn't really delete. It digested. Every file she picked turned into a soft warmth that filled the room, like the data breathed out one last time before it died. Mira cracked her knuckles and opened the first file.

Mira started where the Bureau told her to: the early years. She picked the village massacre, the crime that made Tisseren famous. The room warmed. The file blurred and vanished. But the warmth didn't fade. It pressed against her skin, and for half a second she smelled smoke that wasn't there.

Mira kept going, faster now. Each file she fed the machine made the room hotter. Then a voice came out of the warmth, dry and amused. 'You're not deleting me,' it said. 'You're moving me. Into you.' She froze. The voice sounded exactly like the General.

Mira talked back. 'If I'm just moving you,' she said, 'then I choose where you go.' She rerouted the machine's output away from herself and into the cold backup drives down in the basement. The voice's tone changed. For the first time, it sounded afraid.

The voice tried to bargain. 'The backups will be found. Someone will read me, and I'll wake up whole.' Mira nodded. 'Maybe. But not in me, and not tonight.' She finished routing every file to the cold drives, then sealed the drive bay with her own code. The warmth left the room. She walked out with him locked behind her.