The receipt sat on her desk for eleven minutes before Helena Voss allowed herself to move.
She had been taught, long ago, that the worst decisions are made in the first quarter-hour after a loss. So she sat in her chair on the ninety-first floor with her hands flat on the desk, exactly where they had been when the hologram cut, and she let the quarter-hour pass.
Settlement final on contact. No fee.
Thirty years. Signed away in a single stroke, on a ledger she could not reverse, to a young man who had looked at her the way a doctor looks at an X-ray.
At 7:31, she stood up, poured the coffee she had made two hours ago down the sink in her private washroom, and made a fresh one. Then she called Marlowe.
He came in without knocking, which he had never done in nineteen years. He had seen the notice of transfer. Every senior officer in Auristrade had received it at 7:24, routed automatically through systems that, as of this morning, no longer belonged to her.
