I stared at the black screen of my phone, my heart hammering against my ribs.

I knew I had to act fast before anyone came down to the basement levels.

I turned back to the computer terminal and began downloading the raw files.

My fingers trembled as I plugged my personal flash drive into the USB port.

I clicked on the sub-folder labeled *Preservative Stability Trials* and dragged it to the drive icon.

The progress bar appeared, slowly crawling across the screen.

To make sure I had everything, I opened the local laboratory archives on the internal drive.

These were the offline backup files from my very first week on the project.

I opened the original chromatography reports and compared them to the active registry database.

The contrast was stark.

In my original tests, the preservative peaks showed a clean, organic compound.

I had spent months perfecting that lavender-rosemary extract blend.

Andrew and I had spent hours in the testing kitchen, tasting the samples and laughing about the bitter trials.

Now, those safe organic compounds had been systematically deleted.