The Soma Decree

Vera Caspel knows exactly how a Sanctum terminal sounds when it accepts a Tier-4 audit card, clinical, final, like a key turning in a lock made of bone. For years she has lived by that sound, a quiet auditor inside Archive Level 4 of the Meridian order, content to catalog the dead records no one is supposed to read. But one routine query surfaces a sealed decree stamped with a date older than the Council itself, a directive that contradicts every official history she has ever certified. The Soma Council swears it is a fabrication. Within hours, the colleague who first flagged the file is gone, and Vera's own clearance begins quietly hemorrhaging permissions she has held for a decade.