For several minutes Kora stood in the barn with the phone in her hand. Then she saved copies of her post, took screenshots of the time and comments, and removed the public photographs. She called Leah in the morning and told her exactly what had happened. Leah listened, then asked if Kora was willing to keep a separate incident log along with the veterinary records.
"Of course," Kora said.
"Don't make assumptions about who called. Write down what was actually said."
"He knew the lot code."
"Then that is what we know."
The following morning, a black SUV slowed at the end of the Halstead driveway. Kora was carrying water to the isolation area when she saw it stop beside the old wooden sign with Aaron's name on it. The windows were dark, and the vehicle moved on before she could make out a license plate. She took a photograph of the back of it anyway, then stood at the gate feeling a coldness that had nothing to do with the weather.
Across the county, at Harrington's central hatchery, Nolan Pierce sat at a workstation whose screen displayed the results of the latest scanning cycle. Nolan was twenty-nine, an instrumentation technician who had joined the company because its research division promised difficult work and modern equipment. He knew the V-17 batch better than most of the managers who had signed its disposal order. He also knew that the machine which had condemned it had not been properly calibrated since a software update three weeks before the eggs were dumped.
He had seen the problem in the drift pattern. The scanner's sensor array was detecting ordinary shell features as failure indicators, and the fault became especially pronounced with the distinctive shells in the heritage trial. Nolan had filed a maintenance ticket with the supporting measurements. His supervisor had declined to stop the line because doing so would delay three larger client orders, and the response in the system was short enough to fit on a single line: Continue operations. Review after scheduled shipments.
A week later Nolan checked the records and found that the review had been marked completed without an adjustment being performed. He raised the concern again. Then Genevieve Harrington's office issued an instruction that V-17 was to be recorded as nonviable inventory and removed before the quarterly program audit. Nolan had been told that the decision reflected business priorities beyond the technical staff's responsibility.
He had a wife, Evelyn, a child with asthma, and health coverage they could not replace quickly. When he saw Kora's photograph on a farming page, he recognized the code immediately and called her without thinking through what he might be risking. The following morning he regretted the call and then regretted regretting it. He opened the scanner's archive and began noting which original records still existed, careful not to alter them or take data he had no authority to access.