A long pause. “We’re evacuating the lower valley now. How did you know?”
By 2 a.m., Mira had extracted a 47-second clip: the exact moment of the dam’s secondary spillway collapsing. She overlaid GPS coordinates from the sub-encoder—data hidden in the phantom feed’s timecode. Then she sent it, anonymously, to county emergency management, the sheriff, and three independent hydrologists.
Her heart slammed her ribs. Station 7’s main transmitter was down for maintenance. No one else could see this. But the VMix 27 session had auto-record enabled.
She smiled, closed the session, and deleted the logs.