Bram did not bring the recovered case to the inquiry as if it had spent the night beneath his bed.
The independent custodians brought it. Two witnesses checked the outer condition against the retreat record before the case was opened. Sera supplied the remote copy receipts and the correction history. The first preservation had happened while people were still leaving the damaged corridor; this morning’s submission would not become a new beginning that erased those earlier hands.
Bram brought his own records separately.
The investigator asked him to sit where the recording operator could hear him. A survivor’s representative sat across the table. She had a private packet of questions, some from relatives who did not want to attend, some from people who would never willingly occupy a room with Bram. He did not ask whose questions were whose.
The case index lay between them.
Emergency deployment directives. Prisoner-transfer orders. Current amendments. Missing sections the technician had identified. An office backup that had not been recovered with the case. Other copies that might exist along the receiving chain.
“Tell us how you obtained this,” the investigator said.
Bram described the chamber, the aide who allowed the recovery, the danger of leaving, and the independent custody reached afterward. He named the points he had witnessed and the later transfers he knew from receipts. Rook’s refusal to apologize did not belong to a paper order, so he gave it as his own account, witnessed where others had heard it, not as text…
