Dela Okonkwo posted through a single broker vouch with no operational history in the Signal Network. The posting is personal — the language doesn't read like someone who's worked with freelancers before. She knows where the drive is. She knows the window. She's paying everything she has. C-tier jobs at this price point usually mean the client is desperate and the job is simple on paper. Simple on paper is not the same as simple.

The apartment belonged to Dela's brother, Emeka Okonkwo, who died in it three days ago. Arcturus listed the cause as an altercation — a fight that went wrong. Dela doesn't believe it. Emeka worked as an informal data broker out of the Gray Zone 8 — low-level, the Gray Zone-level work, the kind of thing that keeps people fed rather than making anyone rich. The drive behind the ventilation grille was his work archive: client lists, transaction logs, data fragments he'd been paid to hold and pass along. Dela wants it because she believes it contains evidence of what actually happened to her brother — who hired him last, what he was moving. She may be right. She may also be walking a freelancer into lifting evidence from a crime scene that Arcturus is actively investigating because someone with more resources than Emeka Okonkwo wants that drive gone before Arcturus finds it, and Dela is the unwitting instrument of that goal.