Layla
The praise for Chad lingers in the air for days. It’s a toxic perfume I can’t escape. He walks with a new swagger. He speaks louder in meetings. He delegates his actual work to junior analysts while he takes long, important sounding phone calls in the hallway.
He ignores me completely. It is as if I am a piece of furniture, a lamp, the pot of a fake plant in the corner. This is worse than his condescension. It is an erasure.
He finally acknowledges my existence on a Wednesday afternoon.
“Hassan.”
I look up from my monitor. I’ve been reformatting spreadsheets, a task so tedious it feels like a deliberate punishment.
He drops a heavy cardboard box on my desk. It sends up a puff of dust that smells like old paper and forgotten time.
“New project for you,” he says, wiping his hands on his trousers as if he’s just touched something unclean. “Something that requires a high level of… organizational skill.”
I stare at the box. It’s overflowing with faded, drooping file folders.
“The firm’s pre digital quarterly reports. From the nineties,” he explains, a smirk playing on his lips. “They were scanned years ago, but the resolution is terrible. I need you to go through them, page by page. Re scan any corrupted documents. Then you need to manually verify that each one is correctly tagged in the digital archive server.”
My heart sinks. It’s a morgue of paperwork. A task for a machine, not a person. It could take weeks. Weeks of being buried, out of sight and out of mind.
“It’s critical work,” he says, his tone dripping with fake sincerity. “Preserving the company’s history.”
“I understand,” I say, my voice flat. There is no point in arguing. There is no one to argue to.
“Excellent. The old records room is in the sub basement. You’ll find a scanner down there. Try not to get lost.”
He walks away, leaving me with the box and the scent of decay.
The sub basement is cold. The air is still and heavy, and the only sound is the low hum of the building’s mechanical systems. The records room is a cage of metal shelves stretching up into the gloom, packed tight with identical cardboard boxes. It’s where data comes to die.
I find the workstation in the corner, a dinosaur of a computer next to a high speed scanner. I take the first folder from the box. “Q3 1998.” The paper is brittle in my hands.
I begin the process. Page by page. Financial statements, balance sheets, executive summaries. The numbers are smaller than they are now, the company a fraction of the behemoth it has become. But the DNA is there. Aggressive acquisitions. Ruthless cost cutting. The Veleno way.
Days blur into a monotonous cycle. The elevator ride down to the cold. The hum of the scanner. The click of the mouse. I see no one except the occasional maintenance worker. It’s lonely. But it’s also quiet. Away from Chad’s smug face and the pitying glances of the other analysts, I can breathe.
I can think.
I finish the nineties and move on to the early two thousands. The numbers get bigger. The company grows. The reports get thicker.
Then I see it.
It’s a line item in the fourth quarter report for 2002. A charitable donation. The amount is a clean one million dollars.
One million dollars. It jumps off the page.
The recipient is listed as “The Sunlight Children’s Fund.” It sounds pleasant. Wholesome.
But something feels off. Most of the other donations listed in these reports are smaller, more specific. A hundred thousand to a university. Fifty thousand to the city ballet. A million dollars is a statement. And I’ve never heard of The Sunlight Children’s Fund.
I make a note of it on a scrap of paper. A puzzle piece. I put it aside and keep scanning.
Two years later, in the 2004 Q3 report, I find another one. A different name. “The Ocean’s Promise Foundation.” A different amount. One point five million dollars. Another clean, round number.
Another puzzle piece.
My pulse quickens. This is no longer just about scanning. I start looking for them. I hunt through the pages, my eyes skipping past the revenue projections and asset columns, searching only for these large, one off donations.
I find a third. 2006. “The Mountain’s Peak Initiative.” Two million dollars.
I have three pieces now. Enough to see a shape emerging.
During my lunch break, I don’t go to the sad little cafe in the lobby. I stay in the cold of the records room. I pull out my personal phone. Under the dim light of the workstation, I search for The Sunlight Children’s Fund.
Nothing.
No website. No address. No mention in any news articles. No registration number in any public database of charitable organizations. It’s a ghost.
My fingers tremble as I type in the second name. The Ocean’s Promise Foundation.
Same result. A complete digital vacuum.
I try the third, my breath held tight in my chest. The Mountain’s Peak Initiative.
Nothing. It doesn’t exist. It never existed.
This is not a mistake. This is a design.
“Playing hide and seek?”
I jump, fumbling my phone and nearly dropping it. Elena is standing in the doorway, a small smile on her face. She’s holding a paper bag.
“Figured you might be down here,” she says, walking into the room. “Chad was bragging about his brilliant new ‘archival integrity project’. I brought you a sandwich. The good kind, not the lobby kind.”
“Elena. You scared me.” My heart is hammering against my ribs.
“Sorry.” Her smile fades as she gets a closer look at my face. “Are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Just… tired,” I lie, forcing a smile. “It’s a lot of paper.”
She looks around at the towering shelves. “He’s trying to bury you. I told you. Keep you in the past so you don’t outshine him in the present.”
Her words hit me with a jolt of irony. The past is exactly where the secrets are. The secrets that are still very much alive.
“It’s fine,” I say, taking the sandwich from her. “It’s quiet down here.”
“Too quiet,” she says, her eyes full of concern. “Don’t let him break you, Layla. This is what he does. He isolates people until they just give up.”
“I’m not giving up,” I say, and the words feel more true than anything I’ve said all day.
She nods, seemingly satisfied. “Good. Just… be careful. Digging around in the history of a place like this might uncover things that aren’t really dead.”
She gives my shoulder a quick squeeze and then leaves, the heavy door hissing shut behind her.
Her warning echoes in the silent room. Things that aren’t really dead.
I spend the rest of the week working with a feverish intensity. I scan the documents as I’m supposed to, but my real work is the hunt. I find more names. The Golden Fields Trust. The Harbor Light Project. The Silent River Fund. Each one a multi million dollar donation. Each one a complete ghost online.
Then I find something else. Something that makes my blood run cold.
Using my access to the main server, a privilege granted for my task, I look up the incorporation documents for The Sunlight Children’s Fund. I find its date of establishment. March 12th, 2002.
The Veleno Corp payment was made on October 18th, 2002.
I then search for its dissolution date. February 5th, 2003.
My breath catches.
It was created. It received the money. And then it was dissolved. All within less than a year.
I check the next one. The Ocean’s Promise Foundation. The same pattern. Established a few months before the payment. Dissolved a few months after.
And the next. And the next. They are all the same.
These are not charities. They are shell companies. Temporary vessels designed for a single purpose. To take millions of dollars from Veleno Corp and make it disappear.
This is not just covering up lavish expenses. This is not about stealing an algorithm. This is something else entirely. Something big. Something dangerous.
I know I should stop. I should forget everything I’ve seen. I should finish Chad’s stupid project and pray I get offered a permanent position so I can pay for Maya’s medicine. That is the smart thing to do. That is the safe thing to do.
But I see Chad’s smirking face. I feel the weight of my mother’s worry. I hear the cold, dismissive voice on the phone from the pharmacy.
The world is run by men like Chad, protected by systems like this. And I am tired of being their victim.
That night, I stay late. The building empties out, the silence returning. But this is a different kind of silence. It’s not the dead silence of the archive. It is the charged silence of opportunity.
I go back to my own desk on the thirty fourth floor. I plug my personal USB drive into the port. It’s a cheap thing I got for free at a college career fair. No one would ever look twice at it.
I open a new text document. I do not use any company software. I work from a portable encryption program I have on the drive itself.
My fingers fly across the keyboard. I type out the names. The dates. The amounts. Every ghost. Every phantom payment. I document the pattern of creation and dissolution. I lay out the entire scheme as I understand it so far.
It is a skeleton key. A map of a secret kingdom.
When I am finished, I encrypt the file. The password is a complex alphanumeric string based on my sister’s birthday and the chemical formula for Albuterol. Unbreakable. Unforgettable.
I name the file ‘Project Nightingale’.
I drag it into a hidden folder on my drive and then I run a scrubbing program to erase any trace of the file from the computer’s temporary memory.
Then I eject the drive and slip it into my pocket. It feels impossibly heavy. Heavier than the box of archives. Heavier than the weight of my family’s debt.
It is the weight of the truth.
I have it now. A small, dangerous piece of it.
I walk out of the office and into the night. The city lights glitter, but they look different now. Not like a galaxy of possibilities. Like a web. And I am standing right in the center, holding a single, vibrating thread.
