She cracked her knuckles left hand first, then right. The left popped clean. The right made the soft wet sound of a knuckle that had been negotiated with, and Yuki was already past it, already typing, the sound as unremarkable to her now as the generator's hum through the floor of the building or the smell of the matapa going cold on its plate beside her elbow. Garlic and cassava leaf. She'd eat the rest later or she wouldn't.

The numbers did not match.

ENC's community impact report — the one filed with the ICA preparatory committee in Geneva, the one Yuki had PDF'd and highlighted in four colors — listed 214 households voluntarily resettled from the original strewn field perimeter. Gabriel Cossa's cooperative, the Nhamacurra Community Development Association, had submitted meeting minutes to ENC as part of the consultation process. Those minutes referenced 283 families in the eastern blocks alone who'd been told to move before the fence went up.

214 households. 283 families. These were not the same unit of measurement, which meant either someone was sloppy or someone was smart, and in Yuki's experience the answer was usually both. A household could contain multiple families. But the eastern blocks were only one section of the perimeter. If 283 families lived in just that section, 214 households for the entire resettlement was either a miracle of multigenerational cohabitation or a number that had been built to be true rather than counted to be true.

She opened the satellite imagery. The captures were six months apart: October 2025 and April 2026. She toggled between them, watching the perimeter fence appear between frames like a scar. In October, the soil around the processing facility was the same brown-grey as everywhere else. In April, a rust-orange discoloration fanned out from where the runoff channels had been dug, following the drainage gradient southeast toward the river. Seasonal, maybe. Iron-rich laterite oxidizing after the rains exposed it. She flagged it in her notes — soil color shift, drainage pattern, probably nothing — and moved on.

The cooperative's minutes were in two files. She'd gotten both from Tomás, who'd gotten them from a source inside the association who Yuki had never met and whom Tomás described only as "the one who photocopies everything." The files had the same name except for a version number. The earlier draft was 1.2 megabytes larger than the later one.

Yuki knew what a 1.2-megabyte discrepancy meant in a text document. It meant content had been removed.

She opened them side by side.

The later draft — the one submitted to ENC — was clean. Complaints about water access, requests for timeline clarity on energy allocation, a note about the school road. Bureaucratic, reasonable, the kind of document that made consultation look like consultation. The earlier draft had all of this plus a paragraph on page four, between the water access complaint and the school road note, that Yuki read three times.

Families in the eastern blocks reported that children's skin rashes, present since the dry season, had worsened following the excavation of drainage channels for the processing facility's runoff system. Three households reported new cases in children under five. Community health worker Beatriz Fonseca documented the complaints but noted she lacked testing capacity to establish causation.

Gone. Not revised, not softened. Gone. The later draft jumped from water access to the school road as if the rashes had never been mentioned.

Yuki sat back. The chair — plastic, from the grocery store downstairs, forty meticais — creaked under the shift.

She'd been treating the cooperative as her clean source. Not uncritical, not naive about it; she knew community organizations had politics, had factions, had people who wanted to look good for funders. But the hierarchy in her head had been clear: ENC was the institution with the incentive to minimize, and the cooperative was the counter-voice with the incentive to document. That binary had just developed a crack, and the crack was not theoretical. It was a paragraph about children's skin rashes that someone inside the cooperative had decided ENC should not see.

Who. She needed to know who.

She also needed to eat the matapa, and she also needed to file by morning, and she also needed to not spiral into the version of this story where every source was compromised and the truth was a receding horizon, because that version was self-indulgent and also, she thought, cracking her right knuckles again without noticing, it didn't publish.

Her phone showed an unread message from a Mozambican number she didn't recognize. Probably the Health Ministry contact Tomás had pinged on her behalf. She'd open it after she filed.

She pulled up her notes file and copied the deleted paragraph into it. She highlighted it, considered her label options, and typed: unconfirmed / removed from submitted draft / source of edit unknown. Then she added: cross-ref water quality complaints? Below that, almost as an afterthought: check earlier minutes for other removals.

Because the water complaints were there too, now that she was looking. In the earlier draft, page two: three families in the eastern blocks had reported changes in well water taste and color following the installation of the new borehole pump. The later draft mentioned the pump installation as a successful outcome of ENC's community investment program. The complaints were gone.

So it wasn't one edit. It was a pattern. Someone inside the cooperative had gone through the minutes before submission and stripped out every complaint that could be read as linking community health concerns to ENC's operations. Leaving in the complaints about timelines and access — the ones that made the cooperative look like a responsible partner asking for better process — and removing the ones that made it look like the community was getting sick.

Yuki reached for her water bottle, unscrewed the cap, and shook out her evening Caldrex. The pale blue pill was small, smaller than an aspirin. Her sports medicine doctor in Osaka had prescribed it four months ago for the wrist, and it had done what eight years of NSAIDs and compression sleeves and cortisone injections hadn't: made the pain stop. Not managed it. Stopped it. She'd Googled the active compound once, seen caladrite-derived anti-inflammatory, thought huh, and kept taking it. She put the pill on her tongue and washed it down.

The water was from the grocery store. It tasted fine.