👉 Previous Action: You chose to hide a coded physical message inside junior courier Leo Chen’s outgoing mailbag.
The moment arrived with a silent urgency. Leo Chen, the young courier, ambled down the hall, pushing his cart laden with manila envelopes and brown boxes. He stopped at the mail chute near Kien’s exit station, a routine movement he’d performed a thousand times.
As Leo reached for the heavy flap of his canvas mailbag, a subtle, almost imperceptible shift in Kien’s posture took place. His hand, already holding the tiny folded thermal strip, moved with practiced nonchalance. He dropped his pen, a minor disruption designed to draw a guard’s fleeting glance away.
Leo bent over, adjusting a stack of envelopes. For a split second, the top of his open mailbag was unguarded. Kien’s hand darted, precise and swift, depositing the minuscule folded paper deep inside, nestled among official documents. It was done.
A moment later, the exit scan beeped, a familiar chime. The white-gloved attendant swept the scanner over Kien’s head, the daily ritual of erasure. Kien felt the familiar dull throb behind his eyes, the sensation of memory dissolving.
He walked out, the evening air cool on his face, the day’s work a blank space. He returned home, the usual exhaustion settling in.
Two days later, sorting through an old box of belongings in his home office, he felt something small and hard tucked into the lining of an old jacket pocket. His fingers closed around the tiny strip of paper. It felt alien, yet strangely familiar.
Unfolding it, he saw the string of alphanumeric characters. No, not random. A coded message. He recognized the pattern, a legacy encryption he’d designed years ago for secure communications. And the timestamp. It was from two days ago.
He moved to his old, dusty laptop, a relic he rarely used anymore. Following the instructions on the paper, he navigated through forgotten directories, deep into an archived backup. There it was: an auto-synced thread of recovered text messages.
The messages were between Evelyn Brooks-Doan and two unfamiliar board members. They spoke of “project acquisition,” “leveraging personal assets,” and “containment protocols.” Kien’s blood ran cold as he saw his own name mentioned. His past bankruptcy, the trust Evelyn had urged him to sign – all of it discussed with a chilling, clinical detachment.
His breath hitched. He had found it. The link. The proof.
➡️ Read CHAPTER 6 to continue the story
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