The name attached to the digital signature authorizing the sabotage of the crossing signals was not Gideon Cross. It was Viven Laurent printed in clean, unmistakable letters across a timestamp that placed the authorization 2 days before the crash. Malcolm stared at the screen for a long moment, unwilling to trust what he was reading, while Viven went pale beside him in a way that had nothing to do with blood loss this time. He did not accuse her outright. But the question hung in the space between them regardless, heavier for being unspoken.
And for the first time, since he had pulled her off those tracks, Malcolm found himself uncertain whether the woman beside him was entirely who she claimed to be. Viven recovered from the shock faster than he expected, her mind already working through the mechanics of what she was looking at rather than the accusation itself. Gideon had access to her digital signature through years of shared authority over corporate filings, she explained, her voice steadying, even as her hands trembled slightly on the keyboard. The entire plan, she realized aloud, had never simply been about eliminating her. It had been designed from the start to leave behind a trail that pointed conclusively back to her own name, so that even if she survived, she would be the one charged with attempted murder and sabotage rather than the man who had actually orchestrated it.
Malcolm listened to her reasoning and found himself facing a choice that mattered more than almost anything else that had happened that night. He could trust the evidence in front of him at face value, or he could trust the woman who had bled beside him for the better part of 6 hours. He chose Viven, though not blindly and not out of anything so simple as affection alone. He pulled up the raw metadata behind the signature file, the kind of technical detail most people would never think to check, and found exactly what his years of reading system logs had trained him to notice. The time stamp on the authorization had been backdated using a method that left faint, almost invisible seams in the file structure, the digital equivalent of a forged signature under bright enough light.
It was not proof that would satisfy every skeptic immediately, but it was enough for Malcolm, and more importantly, it was the kind of technical detail that would hold up once shown to people who understood exactly what they were looking at. Gideon Cross found them not long after. Stepping into the control building with the calm of a man who had already decided the outcome of the night, regardless of what evidence anyone had gathered, he no longer bothered with denial. Admitting everything in the unhurried tone of a man confident he would never face consequences for any of it. You were supposed to die on those tracks, he said, looking directly at Malcolm rather than Viven, as though the technician had been the real obstacle all along.