"My name is Vivien Ashford. I think you and I have the same problem."
The name landed. He knew it. Everyone at Harland Field knew it. It was painted on the side of every hangar.
He didn't step aside.
"How do I know you're who you say you are?"
"You don't," she said. "But you do know I was drugged at your company's front gate this morning. And you know somebody fired you for noticing. That seems like a reasonable place to start."
He let her in.
She sat on the edge of his secondhand couch and pulled a thick manila folder from her coat. She handed it to him without a word.
Inside were photographs of aircraft components, part inspection sheets, and supplier invoices. Some of them stamped with notes from her own auditors.
Caleb turned the pages slowly. Then he stopped.
It was the same part number. The one in his notebook. The one he had flagged four months ago.
He walked to the drafting table, came back with the notebook, and set it open in front of her. He tapped the page.
"I reported this," he said. "In July. Filed it through the maintenance system, with photos and a serial number. Two days later, I went back to check the status."
He paused.
"The report was gone. Not closed. Not rejected. Deleted, like it had never existed."
Vivien read the handwritten page twice.
Then she looked up at him, and something in her expression shifted. The executive calm cracked, just slightly, at the edges.
"I want to know why they fired you," she said.
Caleb shook his head slowly.
"I think the right question," he said, "is why they want me quiet."
* * *
They didn't storm any offices. They didn't break into any servers.
For the next two days, Caleb and Vivien worked at his kitchen table with two laptops, a pot of coffee that never seemed to empty, and the patience of people who understood that the truth usually hides in the boring parts.
Vivien used her executive credentials to pull everything connected to the Meridian's air data system. Every engineering change order. Every email with the part number in it. Every test report. Every revision to every design file.
Caleb read them the way other people read novels.
At one point, Vivien slid a set of software schematics across the table and asked if he could make sense of them.
He glanced at the cover page and nodded.
"You understand this?"
"I wrote the first version of it," Caleb said. "At Corrigon. Ashford licensed the architecture from them eight years ago. Somebody's changed it since."
By the second night, a pattern had surfaced.