The phone was old.
Black plastic, cracked along the side. It looked like something from another decade.
Elara found it at the bottom of a box in Kayra's storage unit. It buzzed once when she touched it, like it still remembered.
"Burner," NUMA said, taking it gently. "Locked, encrypted, but not wiped."
Elara stared at it. Her chest had already started to tighten.
Something about the weight of it felt... familiar.
NUMA plugged it into her rig. Lines of code scrolled.
Access denied. Then a slow override.
1 audio file found.
Filename: AMA-MEMO-RAVEN
Duration: 04:22
Elara stood still. Her throat dried.
NUMA pressed play.
And Amara's voice filled the room.
"If you're hearing this, it means someone finally found the phone I hid in the medicine box."
"You always hated that cabinet. Sorry, Elara. I figured you'd never open it unless you were desperate."
Elara choked on a breath. Her hands trembled.
Amara's voice was soft. Steady. But beneath it was something tight. Fragile.
"They told me not to talk."
"But the thing about silence? It grows teeth."
"And it eats you from the inside."
There was a pause. The faint sound of something dripping in the background.
"I was pregnant."
The words landed like a brick.
Khalid gasped.
Elara froze.
"He said it was handled. Said it wouldn't become a problem."
"But I saw the way they looked at me. Like I was a mistake. A stain."
"I wanted to keep the baby. I really did."
"But then... I started seeing shadows."
Her voice cracked.
"Senator Diri came to the house. She gave me tea. Said it would help."
"I bled for days."
Elara clenched her fists.
"I don't know if the baby died because of them... or because I was weak."
"But I stopped feeling it. And after that, I stopped feeling anything."
Another long pause.
"I think he knew. My father. I think he always knew."
"And I think... he was proud."
NUMA lowered the volume.
"There's more," she said quietly. "She names names. Mentions secret meetings. Passwords. Places. But it gets darker."
Elara nodded.
"I want it all."
They played the rest in silence.
By the end, no one moved.
No one breathed.
That night, Elara sat alone in the hallway. Phone in her lap. Earbuds in.
She played Amara's voice again.
And again.
Memorizing the pauses.
The pain.
She wasn't crying anymore.
She was cataloguing.
NUMA printed a partial transcript. Khalid annotated it. The names were real. The dates matched. The places existed.
Amara's memo wasn't just grief.
It was a map.
And for the first time, they had a direction.
Elara stood at the edge of the hall, the storm of her chest curling up her spine.
"We're not leaking this," she said.
"We're turning it into fire."
Khalid looked up. "How?"
She smiled.
"We follow the names. One by one."
"And we ruin them."
Outside, the rain started again.
It sounded like memory.
It sounded like war.