The purple stamp was almost worn away at the edge of the card, but Clémence Vautrin saw it before anything else.
She turned her phone over: Julien had just confirmed he would pick Milo up from school.
It was a habit of hers. In an archive box, her eyes went to the signs of circulation before the contents: accession dates, initials, pencil amendments, punched holes, tape whose color did not fit the supposed period. The stories came afterward. That, she kept telling herself, was what distinguished her from the people who sent the Lhomond Center photographs of windows and swore a dead person had blinked in them.
The card read: **TÉLÉ RIVE — MUNICIPAL DEPOSIT — 12.09.2008**. Beneath it, blue handwriting noted: *Saint-Roch / school closure / raw footage 2–5*. The lower right corner was missing. Not recently torn: the fibers had yellowed with the rest of the paper.
“Counting missing corners now?” Rémi asked behind her.
Clémence did not look up.
“Mostly the ones somebody took the trouble to remove.”
“That’s exactly the sort of sentence that sounds frightening when you say it wearing white gloves.”
The consultation laboratory bore no resemblance to what visitors imagined a laboratory would be. Two gray tables, three players that were now hard to find, a fireproof cabinet that slammed too loudly, and a ventilation system in the wall whose rumble made the plastic cases vibrate. They did not show donors their files here. They kept them out.
Rémi set a small black hard drive on the table, already connected to a workstation isolated from the network.
“Bit-for-bit image complete. Hash calculated. You can touch the working copy, not the original.”
“Time?”
“Nine twenty-seven.”
Clémence entered the time on the processing sheet and signed. Before opening the file, she added: *MiniDV tape said to have been filmed in 2004. Origin: Télé Rive lot. Original not examined by analyst. Lower right corner of card missing. Municipal stamp predates arrival at the Center.*
End of excerpt. Discover the other stories in this universe.