They argued. Then, reluctantly, they walked together to the Product silo, then to Sales. Each door opened to a pale, startled face. Each silo held a piece of the truth: the source of the grain, the shipping route, the payment, the need. But no one had ever assembled the pieces.
Every morning, she climbed the spiral staircase to her terminal. Her job was to tend the "Harvest"—the flow of customer information. She cleaned it, labeled it, and stored it in perfect, airtight bins. She never asked where the Harvest went after she pressed "export." That was someone else’s silo.
"It’s empty," Kael retorted. "You stripped off the coordinates, the contact name, the reason for the order. You turned a shipment of food into a math problem."
In the center of the courtyard, they laid out the fragments on the gravel. Elara provided the Error . Kael provided the truck’s GPS log. The Sales lead provided the client’s frantic emails. The Product manager provided the design spec for the new relief-agency interface.
Across the courtyard stood three other silos: Sales, Logistics, and Product. They gleamed in the sun like separate planets.
That night, Elara couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking about the cylindrical walls of her silo. They weren't protective. They were just blinders.
