The Encrypted File Appears

POV: Malia

The alert tone from my secondary monitor sliced through the quiet of my living room at exactly 2:14 AM. It was a harsh, flat beep that made me flinch. I had fallen asleep on the sofa with my laptop resting on my knees. I shoved the machine aside, the sudden adrenaline clearing the exhaustion from my brain, and moved to the heavy desk tucked into the corner of the room.

The script I had running against the Victoria Police archival servers had been chewing through encrypted directories for three straight weeks. It was a brute-force decryption tool I had coded from scratch, designed to look for anomalies in the file structures attached to Callan’s badge number. For three weeks, it had returned nothing but dead ends and heavily redacted routine traffic stops.

Tonight, the screen was entirely different.

I dropped into the desk chair, my fingers automatically hitting the keyboard to wake the primary monitors. The command terminal was scrolling rapidly, a cascade of green text against black, before it finally locked onto a single, stable directory pathway. The firewall bypass had held. I was inside the restricted evidence server.

My chest tightened as I navigated the folder hierarchy. The interface was clunky, designed for internal use, but the file names were clear. I bypassed the homicide reports I had already memorized and clicked into a sub-folder labeled Internal_Audit_Restricted.

There was only one file inside. It was a P*F. The title was a string of alphanumeric characters ending in Callan’s initials: C.R.

I clicked the file. The loading wheel spun for five agonizing seconds. I held my breath, terrified the system security would ping my IP and lock me out before the document rendered. I had routed my connection through three separate proxy servers, but Victoria Police had recently upgraded their cyber division. If they caught me in this specific folder, I was facing a decade in a federal facility.

The document opened. It wasn't a standard police report. It was a raw, unredacted transcript of an emergency dispatch call, accompanied by the responding officer's initial field notes. The date at the top was the night Callan died.

I leaned closer to the monitor, the harsh blue light reflecting off my glasses. My eyes scanned the text, skipping the automated dispatch timestamps to get to the core dialogue. The official story was that Callan had been ambushed in a warehouse district by an unknown assailant during a solo recon mission. He had bled out before anyone found him.

But the transcript in front of me told a different story. The 000 call hadn't been anonymous.

Operator: Emergency, police, fire, or ambulance?

Caller: Ambulance. I need an ambulance at the Port Phillip cargo yards. Section 4.

Operator: Sir, what is the nature of the emergency?

Caller: He's shot. Two rounds to the chest. He's a cop. Send the paramedics now.

Operator: Sir, stay on the line. What is your name?

I traced the line of text with my index finger, my heart hammering a chaotic rhythm against my ribs. The caller’s name was recorded in the database, automatically matched by the telecom provider's registry.

Caller ID confirmed: J. Vance.

Julian.

I stopped breathing. The air in the room felt suddenly thin. Julian had been there. He had made the call. He had stood over my brother's bleeding body, and for the last eight months, he had looked me in the eye and sworn he had only arrived on the scene after the police taped it off.

My eyes dropped to the responding officer’s field notes at the bottom of the page. The text was blunt and clinical.

Notes: Arrived on scene at 23:14. The victim was identified as Detective Callan Reyes. Deceased. Subject J. Vance was present at the scene. Vance weapon discharged. Ballistics match pending. Vance was instructed by the Deputy Commissioner to leave the scene prior to forensics arrival. Incident categorized as classified per DC orders.

My hands started to shake. I pulled back from the keyboard, staring at the glaring white screen. Julian hadn't just been there. His weapon had been fired. And the police had covered it up for him.

The phone on my desk lit up. It was Julian.

I stared at his name glowing on the screen, the silence of my apartment suddenly feeling like a trap. He had told me he was coming over at eight with the data drive. It was only two in the morning. I looked from the ringing phone to the unredacted file proving he had lied to me about the night my brother died.

The phone kept ringing.