The Chairman's car had barely cleared the front gates before the air in the salon turned frigid again. Mwansa and Chileshe were already locked in a low-voiced, intense debate in the library, leaving Zazu and Leya standing in the cooling marble rotunda.
"They think they've won," Zazu whispered, his eyes tracking the light under the library door. "They think the Chairman just bought them another ten years of silence."
Leya was still holding her cello, her fingers aching from the tension of the performance. "He didn't buy silence, Zazu. He bought us time. Your mother said it herself—the Consortium keys are still active. If Musi's father is digging, he's not just looking for a scandal. He's looking for the encryption."
Zazu looked at her, then down at the floorboards. "There's a room. Under the guest wing. My father calls it the 'cold storage,' but I've never seen a servant go in there with a tray or a mop."
"The backup drives," Leya breathed.
They moved with the practiced stealth of two people who had spent their childhoods navigating the shadows of powerful adults. Instead of the main stairs, they took the service lift to the basement, descending past the wine cellar and the laundry rooms until the air turned sharp and metallic.
The basement here was unfinished, the walls raw concrete. At the end of a long, dimly lit corridor sat a heavy reinforced steel door with a digital keypad.
"The code," Leya prompted.
"It won't be my birthday this time," Zazu muttered, his fingers hovering over the keys. He closed his eyes, thinking back to the snippets of his father's phone calls. "He always talks about 'The Foundation.' The date the new republic was sworn in."
He punched in *241064*.
The lock hummed, a deep, hydraulic sound that echoed in the narrow space. The door swung open to reveal a room that looked like a server farm from a decade ago. It was chilled to a precise temperature, the blue LED lights of the racks casting long, eerie shadows.
"This is it," Zazu said, stepping inside. "This is the ghost of 2012."
They weren't looking for paper ledgers here. They were looking for the hardware. Leya walked to a central terminal, her heart hammering. On the desk sat a single, silver hard drive, labeled in her mother's handwriting: **L-KAP / Z-TEM: FINAL RECONCILIATION.**
"It's a joint drive," Leya said, her voice trembling. "They didn't just work together on the audit. They built the vault together."
She plugged the drive into the terminal. The screen flickered to life, a waterfall of code cascading down the monitor.
"Wait," Zazu said, leaning over her shoulder. "Look at the outgoing transfers. These aren't just the Mauritius accounts."
Leya scrolled down. The list was endless. Small, untraceable amounts being siphoned every month for ten years. Not to the Tembos. Not to the Kapiris.
"The Consortium," Leya whispered. "They've been bleeding the country dry this whole time. My mother didn't hide the money to keep it—she hid it to bait them. She was tracking the leak."
"And my father used the 'stabilization fund' to cover the holes so no one would notice the theft," Zazu added, his face pale in the blue light. "He wasn't hoarding the money for power, Leya. He was using it to stop the country from realizing it was already empty."
Suddenly, the terminal beeped. A red alert flashed on the screen: **REMOTE ACCESS DETECTED. LOCATION: EXTERNAL IP – ZIA CAMPUS.**
"Someone is remoting in," Zazu hissed. "Musi's father. Or someone working for him at the school."
"They're downloading the encryption keys," Leya said, her fingers flying across the keyboard. "If they get those, they can unlock the Mauritius accounts and empty them before we can tell anyone."
"Delete it," Zazu said.
"What?"
"The whole drive. If we delete the keys, the money is locked forever. No one gets it. Not the Consortium, not my father, not yours."
Leya looked at the screen. This was her mother's legacy. It was the only thing that could prove her innocence. If she deleted it, the truth died with the files. She would always be the daughter of a thief.
"Zazu, if I do this, I can never clear her name."
Zazu took her hand, his grip firm and warm in the freezing room. "You'll clear it by being the one who finally stopped the theft. Your mother didn't want a statue, Leya. She wanted a future for you. This is it."
Leya looked into his eyes, seeing the boy who was willing to destroy his own father's "stabilization" safety net to do what was right. She hit the *Enter* key.
The screen went black. The servers whirred into a high-pitched whine and then fell silent.
The "Debt" was gone.
But as they stood in the silence of the archive, a heavy footstep sounded in the corridor outside. The steel door creaked.
"I told you," a voice boomed—Mwansa Tembo's voice, but stripped of all its warmth. "I told you the girl would be the end of us, Chileshe."
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