The Encrypted File Appears

POV: Malia

The blinking cursor on my secondary monitor mocked me, keeping rhythm with the dull, throbbing ache at my temples. I rubbed my eyes, pressing the heels of my palms into my sockets until bursts of static color flared behind my eyelids. The clock in the corner of the screen read 3:14 AM. The house was utterly silent, the kind of heavy, pressurized quiet that only exists in massive, empty properties. Downstairs, Jarrah’s security detail would be doing their hourly rotations, their rubber-soled boots making no sound on the imported hardwood. Up here, in the cold ambient glow of my setup, there was only me and the ghost of my brother.

I dropped my hands and stared at the terminal window again. My custom decryption script had been crawling through the Victoria Police internal servers for eleven days. It was a reckless, stupid gamble, pinging localized nodes through a proxy chain that would take a forensic team weeks to untangle, but Callan’s official autopsy report had never made sense. The math didn’t add up. The timeline of his fatal accident was full of missing hours. Someone had scrubbed the truth, and I was going to find out who.

A sharp, synthesized chime cut through the quiet.

My breath caught in my throat. I sat up straight, the leather of my chair creaking sharply beneath me. The terminal window, previously a waterfall of scrolling gray code, had stopped. A single line of green text hung in the center of the black void.

Query Match Found: CLN-994-UNREDACTED.

I felt a cold rush of adrenaline wash down my spine, pooling heavily in my stomach. The mouse felt slick under my trembling fingers as I clicked the line, executing the pull command. My heart hammered against my ribs, loud enough that I swore it echoed in the empty room. This was it. The real file. Not the sanitized, stamped garbage they handed my family at the precinct, but the raw, unfiltered data from the night Callan died.

The screen flashed. A progress bar appeared, stalling at four percent.

"Come on," I whispered, the sound of my own voice thin and desperate. "Don't choke now. Just give me the headers."

I leaned closer, my nose inches from the monitor, watching the percentage tick up with agonizing slowness. Six percent. Nine. A bead of sweat slid down my neck, sticking my shirt to my collarbone. The server was resisting. The file size was massive, far too large for a standard incident report. There were attachments. Audio files. Maybe crime scene photos that hadn't been digitally altered. The reality of what I was about to see hit me like a physical blow, making my hands shake. Could I actually look at it? Could I look at my brother’s broken body if it came across the screen?

The floorboards in the hallway groaned.

I froze. The sound was faint, barely perceptible over the hum of my processor, but I knew it instantly. It was the specific, heavy footfall of Jarrah.

Panic seized my chest, squeezing tight. I slammed my hand onto the keyboard, hitting the kill-switch macro I had programmed for moments exactly like this. The terminal window vanished instantly, replaced by a benign spreadsheet of financial forecasts Jarrah had asked me to review yesterday. I grabbed my coffee mug, bringing it to my lips just as the handle to my door turned.

Jarrah stepped into the room. He didn’t bother turning on the main light. He stood in the doorway, framed by the dim amber glow of the hallway sconces, a dark silhouette against the warmth of the house. He was still wearing his suit trousers, though the jacket was gone and the sleeves of his charcoal shirt were rolled up to his forearms. He looked exhausted, the sharp angles of his jaw tight and unforgiving.

"You're still awake," he said. His voice was a low rumble, devoid of inflection, but I could hear the faint edge of disapproval in it.

I forced myself to swallow the stale, lukewarm coffee. "I lost track of time. The projections for the merger were more fragmented than I expected."

He didn't move from the doorway, his dark eyes scanning the room, resting for a fraction of a second on the dual monitors before settling on my face. "The merger isn't pressing enough to warrant sleep deprivation. Put it away, Malia."

I hated the way he said my name, with that quiet, immovable authority. It made me want to argue, but my heart was still hammering a frantic rhythm against my sternum. If he walked over here. If he asked to see the screen. If he noticed the unusual CPU heat radiating from the tower under the desk, everything would be over. My hands were shaking too hard to type anyway.

"Just finishing this column," I lied, keeping my voice level. "I'll be done in five minutes."

Jarrah remained silent for a long moment. He leaned against the doorframe, crossing his arms over his chest. The posture was casual, but there was nothing relaxed about the man. He was always coiled, always assessing. I could feel his gaze stripping away the layers of my composure, searching for the lie. He knew me too well now. That was the danger of the last two months. We had spent too much time in these quiet, isolated spaces.

"You're shaking," he observed softly.

I clamped my left hand over my right wrist, pressing them both flat against the edge of the desk. "Too much caffeine. And it's freezing here."

He watched me for another agonizing few seconds. Then, he pushed off the doorframe. He didn't come toward the desk, which sent a wave of dizzying relief through me. Instead, he reached out and adjusted the thermostat on the wall near the door, bumping it up three degrees.

"Five minutes," Jarrah repeated, turning back to the hallway. "If you aren't in bed by then, I'll come back and shut the power off to this room myself."

He pulled the door shut behind him. The click of the latch was deafening.

I let out a shaky breath, slumping forward in my chair, my forehead resting against the cool edge of the desk. I stayed like that until I heard his footsteps fade completely, retreating down the stairs to his wing of the house. When I was sure he was gone, I sat up and tapped the keyboard, recalling the hidden terminal.

The progress bar was gone.

In its place was a red, glaring text box.

ACCESS DENIED. ENCRYPTION PROTOCOL REQUIRES PHYSICAL AUTHENTICATION.

I stared at it, my mind racing. A physical authentication? For a police file? That was impossible. Unless the file wasn't just sitting on a standard server. Unless it had been intercepted, routed, and locked down by a third party with a much higher security clearance. I pulled up the metadata of the block, typing furiously now that the fear of discovery was momentarily gone. I needed to see the origin of the encryption wall.

Lines of code flew past until I isolated the handshake protocol. I read the server route twice, convinced my tired eyes were betraying me. The encryption wasn't coming from the precinct. It wasn't coming from the government.

The firewall blocking Callan's unredacted death file was registered to a private, localized intranet. I checked the IP address, running it against the network map I had quietly built of Jarrah’s estate during my first week here.

The breath punched out of my lungs.

The encryption key blocking Callan's file was sitting on a server inside this very house. Jarrah had it. He had the file. And he had locked it away.