She was consulting now. The work was interesting — she had taken on three clients, all mid-size businesses with data problems, and she was good at it in a way that her work at Zenith had not prepared her for but her time there had. You learned things in difficult situations that you could not learn in comfortable ones. You learned how to map a system you did not fully understand. You learned how to identify what was being hidden by what was visible. You learned how to gather data in conditions that were actively working against the gathering.
She lay in her flat and thought about the building. She thought about this regularly — not obsessively, not with the quality of someone stuck in what had happened, but with the quality of someone who has a problem that is not yet fully solved. Divya. Suresh. Rajan's daughter. The people who had transitioned and were — what? Where? In a state that the database on floor ten tracked but that she had not been able to decode.
The journalist was still reporting. The authorities were moving with the pace of authorities encountering something they did not have a category for — slowly, around the edges, looking for the aspects of it that fit into existing frameworks and addressing those. The labour violations were real. The missing persons were real. The documentation Vikram had sent was real. These were the aspects that the authorities could address, and they were addressing them, and it would take time and it would produce partial accountability because partial accountability was what the system was designed to produce.
