Iria didn't eat lunch.
She told herself she would—she even stood up, walked halfway to the break room, smelled reheated leftovers and burnt coffee—but the thought of food turned her stomach. The files she'd seen sat like a weight behind her eyes, every redacted line pressing for attention.
*Compatible.*
The word refused to stay still in her mind.
She returned to her desk and opened a new document—personal this time, stored locally, unnamed—the kind of file she created was only when she didn't trust the system.
"Start with what you can prove," she murmured, echoing the message she'd written to herself that morning.
She began with dates.
Her blackout. Last night. Full moon.
The construction site rescue. Full moon.
The corrupted timestamps. Full moons.
It felt obvious now, almost insultingly so. She wondered how many times she had noticed and dismissed it before. How many minor inconsistencies she'd smoothed over because acknowledging them would have meant admitting something was wrong with her perception of reality.
Iria pulled up a lunar calendar and pinned it to the side of her screen. Then she accessed the internal archive index and began cross-referencing.
She limited her search to anomalies she could quantify:
– Time discrepancies
– Incomplete footage
– Conflicting reports with no official resolution
The results came slowly at first. The system wasn't designed to flag things like this. It took patience, careful tweaking, and a willingness to follow intuition as much as logic.
Then the pattern emerged.
Clusters of anomalies bloomed across the timeline, faint but unmistakable. Each cluster is aligned with a full moon. Not everyone—some cycles passed quietly—but enough to erase coincidence.
Her chest tightened.
"This is global," she whispered.
She expanded the scope.
Different cities. Different countries. Different decades.
The same soft corrections appeared everywhere: buildings that should have collapsed but didn't, people who should have died but survived, disasters that ended just short of catastrophe. The larger the potential damage, the stronger the anomaly.
Iria leaned back in her chair, the archive lights blurring above her.
Something in the world was breaking on a schedule.
And something else was fixing it.
Her wrist throbbed again, a dull reminder she couldn't ignore.
She opened her phone and navigated to her health records. Sleep data. Movement tracking. Location history.
The app hesitated—then loaded.
Her steps spiked sharply during the blackout hours. Her heart rate showed prolonged elevation. Her location data blurred, smoothed into an imprecise haze the app labeled *signal interference*.
Signal interference during a full moon.
Of course.
Iria swallowed hard.
She scrolled back further. Weeks. Months.
Years.
The pattern didn't begin last night.
It had been happening for at least three years—entire nights scrubbed down to statistical noise. The app hadn't flagged it because the system assumed data loss rather than intentional absence.
"How many?" she whispered.
She counted the red circles on the calendar. Her hand shook as she marked them.
Seventeen.
Seventeen nights she could identify with certainty.
Likely, more she couldn't.
The weight of it pressed down on her, heavy and suffocating. She thought of the man in the café. Of the child in the trench. Of the way he'd said, she'd known exactly what to do.
"I don't," she said softly. "I really don't."
But some part of her did.
She closed her eyes and tried to reach for it—the sense of certainty she'd seen in the photo. The calm competence. The absence of fear.
Nothing answered.
A chair scraped behind her.
Iria jolted, spinning around.
Miriam stood there, brow furrowed. "You okay? You've been staring at that screen for a long time."
"Yes," Iria said too quickly. She forced a breath, relaxed her shoulders. "Just chasing a rabbit hole. You know how it is."
Miriam eyed her for a moment longer, then nodded. "Don't stay late again. You look exhausted."
Iria smiled faintly. "I won't."
But she knew she would.
When Miriam left, Iria minimized the archive windows and reopened the local document.
She typed, slowly, deliberately:
**There is a pattern.
It aligns with the full moon.
It is not personal.
It is structural.**
She paused, fingers hovering.
Then she added:
**If you are reading this and don't remember why you wrote it, trust the data.
You are not broken.
You are being used.**
The words sat on the screen, stark and unforgiving.
Iria saved the file twice, in two different locations, then leaned back and stared at the ceiling.
If the pattern was real—if the world was quietly repaired on a schedule—then last night hadn't been an exception.
It had been an assignment.
And whatever was assigning her didn't care whether she remembered.
Only that she showed up.