Read Chapter 9: The Temp Worker

The email from Julien Perrot was still burning in Camille’s mind when she walked into the server room on Tuesday morning. The air was cold, crisper than the rest of the office, and the low hum of cooling fans filled the space like a restless heartbeat. She’d come down to run a diagnostic on the pilot’s data pipeline—something she could control, something concrete—but the sight of a stranger hunched over the log terminal made her stop dead.

He was young, maybe late twenties, with sandy hair and the kind of nondescript face you’d forget in a lineup. He wore the standard navy polo that all the temp staff wore—the ones who handled mail, printing, the occasional office move—but his hands were moving across the keyboard with a fluency that suggested far more than document shuffling.

“Excuse me,” Camille said.

He didn’t startle, which was the first wrong note. Instead, he turned slowly, fingers already dropping from the keys, and offered a practiced smile. “Oh, hey. Just doing some routine maintenance.”

“Maintenance isn’t scheduled until Thursday.”

“They moved it up.” He gestured vaguely toward the door. “HR said there was a compliance audit coming. Wanted everything cleaned ahead of time.”

Camille stepped closer, her heels clicking against the raised floor panels. “You’re not from the usual facilities contractor.”

“I’m not. Temp. Just brought on this week.” He extended a hand. “Hugo. Hugo Meyer.”

She didn’t take it. “I’m Camille Laurent. Product lead.”

“Oh, I know who you are.” His smile widened just a fraction too much. “Everyone knows who you are.”

The comment landed wrong, like a stone dropped into still water. She studied his face for a moment, searching for something familiar she couldn’t quite place. Then she looked at the screen he’d been working on. It was open to a directory structure she recognized—server logs from the past month.

“What exactly are you cleaning?”

“Old files. Transient data. Standard stuff.” He moved to block her view, casual, but deliberate. “I’ll be out of your way in a few minutes.”

Camille didn’t move. “Transient data from the training job that ran under Antoine’s credentials?”

Hugo’s smile flickered. “I wouldn’t know anything about that. I just follow the list HR gives me.”

“Show me the list.”

For a beat, he hesitated. Then he shrugged and reached for a manila folder on the edge of the terminal desk. He handed it to her with the kind of ease that felt rehearsed. Camille opened it. The first page was a directive from HR—standard language, a signature block at the bottom. The signature belonged to Helene Rousseau, the head of HR, who she knew was on vacation in Corsica this week.

“Helene approved this?”

“I assume so. It’s her signature.”

“She’s out of office,” Camille said flatly. “Has been since last Friday. And she wouldn’t sign off on server work anyway. That goes through IT.”

Hugo’s expression tightened. “Look, I just came to do a job. If there’s a problem, take it up with whoever hired me.”

“Who hired you?”

“The agency. Manpower Solutions.”

“Which agency coordinator?”

A pause. Too long. “I don’t remember the name. Temporary assignment.”

Camille pulled out her phone and began typing a message to Antoine. “Stay here. We’re going to sort this out.”

Hugo’s eyes darted toward the door. “I really need to get back to my next assignment.”

“You’re not going anywhere until I verify your credentials.”

He took a step toward her, and Camille’s instincts screamed. The room was small, the exit behind him. She was alone with a stranger who had just been caught in a server room he had no legitimate reason to be in. Her thumb hovered over the send button.

“Camille?”

Antoine’s voice came from the doorway. He stepped inside, his gaze moving from her to Hugo and back. “Everything okay? You messaged —” He stopped, squinting at the temp worker. His face went pale. “Hugo Meyer.”

Hugo’s composure cracked. “Antoine.”

“You know him?” Camille asked.

Antoine’s jaw tightened. “He worked at my old company. NexaData. He was a data analyst there.” He paused. “He was fired for leaking confidential information to a competitor.”

Hugo’s face flushed. “That was never proven.”

“It was proven enough,” Antoine said coldly. “You sold our client data to an analytics firm three weeks before our biggest product launch. The board settled quietly to avoid the scandal.”

The air in the room changed. Camille’s phone was still clutched in her hand, but she was no longer reaching for the message. She was staring at Hugo, pieces clicking into place. The framed logs. The cleaned files. The runaway training job under Antoine's name. Someone had been methodically erasing their digital tracks, and now the person responsible was standing in front of her wearing a polo shirt with an identity he had no intention of keeping.

“Who hired you?” Camille repeated.

Hugo’s eyes flicked between them. Then he bolted.

He was fast—faster than she expected—shoving past Antoine and into the corridor. Antoine cursed and ran after him, but by the time Camille reached the hallway, Hugo was already rounding the corner toward the stairwell. The office had gone quiet, heads popping up over cubicle walls, watching the chase unfold.

Antoine chased him down the first flight. Then the fire door clanged shut. When Camille caught up, Antoine was standing at the stairwell landing, breathing hard, his hands braced on his knees.

“Security,” he managed. “Call them.”

Camille did. It took security four minutes to respond, and in that time, Hugo Meyer had vanished entirely. Building cameras showed him entering the stairwell. They didn’t show him leaving. No exit logs, no card swipes, no trace of him in the lobby.

“He knew how to disappear,” the security chief said, reviewing the footage. “This isn’t his first time.”

When they returned to the server room, Camille realized what was missing. The directory Hugo had been pruning wasn’t just logs. The older files—the training data that had powered Sentio’s earliest iterations, the backbone of their flagship product—was partially gone. Not deleted, but fragmented. Compressed into archives and shipped to a location she couldn’t trace.

“The early training set,” she breathed. “He took the early training set.”

Antoine leaned over the terminal, scrolling through the remnants. His face darkened. “This isn’t random sabotage. Whoever did this knew exactly what to take. This data represents—” He stopped.

“Represents what?”

“Our core valuation,” he said quietly. “Sentio’s original model, the one we’ve been building everything on. We don’t have a full backup of this offline. Someone just walked out the door with the digital equivalent of our seed funding.”

Camille stared at the empty directory. The implications cascaded through her mind like falling dominoes. If the data was gone, the product was compromised. If the product was compromised, the pilot was dead. If the pilot was dead, the Berlin term sheet was fictional, the board would liquidate, and everything—every promise she’d made to Élodie, every sacrifice she’d made for this company—would evaporate.

And then there was the question cutting through all of it like a knife. Hugo didn’t know their server architecture. He didn’t know where to find Sentio's files. Someone on the inside—someone with deep technical knowledge—had told him exactly where to go.

Théo had asked to meet. He’d said the logs were compromised, and he’d told her explicitly not to bring Antoine.

She looked at Antoine. His phone was ringing.

“It’s security,” he said. “They found something.”

“What?”

He listened for a moment, then his expression shifted. “They found his bag in the stairwell. Doesn’t look like he meant to carry anything out.” He paused. “But there’s a note inside. Addressed to you.”

Cold settled in Camille’s stomach. “What does it say?”

Antoine held the phone away from his ear. “It says: ‘Ask Maxime where the real data went.’”