CAPITAL — THREE WEEKS AFTER THE ARCHIVE ATTACK
The hiring crisis started quietly.
Not with shouting or emergencies or dramatic failures.
With paperwork.
Mira arrived at the morning coordination meeting with a stack of reports thick enough to serve as a weapon and the expression of someone who had already calculated seventeen different ways the next month could collapse.
"We're understaffed," she said.
"We know," Director Chen replied, rubbing his temple. "We've been understaffed since—"
"No." Mira set the stack down with a thump that made two clerks jump. "We were understaffed. Past tense implied survivable shortage. This is different. We are now critically below operational capacity in eleven separate functions, and the archive attack exposed exactly how fragile that makes us."
She began laying out pages like evidence at a trial.
