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“Look,” I said, turning the screen toward him. His gaze moved over the record, the faint yellow glow beneath his skin pulsing once. “That is an accession mismatch,” he stated flatly.

“Yes.”

“A clerical error.”

“Probably.”

He straightened, his tone dismissive. “Then correct it.”

I turned my head and stared at him. He stared back, unmoved. “That’s it?” I asked, unable to keep the disbelief from my voice.

“What else would it be?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m looking.”

His brow tightened, and there it was—the same expression every supervisor I had ever worked under eventually gave me.

Talia, please stop finding things.

I knew that look very well.

“I’ll reconcile it,” I said.

“Good.”

He returned to his station.

I waited until he was occupied before opening the secondary archive.

Maybe he was right.

It could have been nothing more than an old migration error. Zunator had changed record systems more than once as the human reproductive program expanded. I had already spent months cleaning duplicated accession numbers, corrupted collection dates, and one memorable case where a warrior had somehow been classified as his own grandmother.

Mistakes happened.

That was why people like me existed.

Sera’n had understood that before most of the others.

Not everyone in the laboratory had.

The first few weeks had been full of Zunatorians reaching around me to do tasks I was already doing, explaining procedures I understood, or pausing before handing me a specimen as though human fingers might somehow contaminate it through incompetence alone.

Sera’n had never done that.

The first time another technician questioned whether I should be handling reproductive samples, Sera’n hadn’t defended me with some grand speech about humans deserving respect.

He had simply looked at the male and said, “She identified your contamination error yesterday.”

The technician had gone quiet.

Sera’n had handed me the specimen.

“Continue.”

That was it.

No pity.