Page 101 of Make Them Cry
I raise a brow. “That can’t possibly?—”
The prompt flips green. The bundle unfurls into dated memos, clipped emails, and a transcript of a sealed Zoom meeting. We both go very, very still.
I scroll the first memo aloud. “‘HR Compliance Note: Subject S. Presley asserts compensation fraud in DevOps; alleges punitive assignment practices. Referred to liaison H.L. for escalation review. Action: contain.’”
River swallows. “H.L. as in?—”
“Helena Lune,” I finish. My pulse spikes. I open the transcript. It’s short, clinical, the worst kind of tidy:
Andrew K.: “We can’t let this get out before the Q4 investor call.”
H.L.: “I’ll handle the employee. We’ll frame it as a burnout sabbatical.”
Unknown(audio only):“If he goes public, we push Psalm 88. We don’t get squeamish.”
River’s hand finds mine under the table, fingers tight. “That’s the file name.”
“Yeah.” My mouth is dry.
We keep reading. A second doc is a “post-incident checklist” template, last modified byhlune-admin. The checklist includes “device retrieval,” “HR narrative alignment,” and—my stomach turns—“bereavement talking points.” Timestamps fall two days after Shawn’s last code push.
River’s voice is barely there. “They buried him.”
“And anyone who could prove it,” I say. My jaw aches. “There’s more. Look—an access log export.”
We scan the CSV. Three names pop in bold—a telltale flag left by some lazy internal auditor:
hlune-adminelevated tosuperuseron a Sunday.
tkincaid-hr(Tasha) used a shared service account to mount a backup image fromRiver-Q-Backup.
akent(Andrew) approved an emergency HR “data hygiene” sweep two hours after.
River exhales shakily. “So Helena planned the escalation, Andrew signed off, and Tasha did the dirty work.”
