Chapter 62 - Shadows Across the Archive
The threat was no longer theoretical. Within forty-eight hours, our legal team confirmed that the filing company—registered under the innocuous name *Vander & Thorne Heritage Holdings*—was a front backed by a network of private equity investors based in Zurich and Lyon. The corporate architecture was depressingly familiar: nested shell companies designed to conceal the ultimate beneficiaries.
"It has Eduardo's fingerprints all over it," Mateo said late that evening, spreading corporate registry printouts across the dining table under the low-hanging amber lamp. "Eduardo is in a federal holding cell awaiting trial, but his former business partners and the foreign investors who bankrolled his luxury front companies are still out there. They lost their leverage when the Santa Fe warehouse collapsed, but they still hold commercial licenses and capital."
"They don't care about the art," I said, staring at the legal notices. "They want exclusive rights to market 'indigenous luxury' to high-end fashion houses in Paris and Milan without having to pay royalties or respect the collective ownership of the communities."
"Worse than that," Paloma added, sitting cross-legged by the fireplace where a kettle of herbal tea simmered. "If they own the patent, our village cooperative cannot legally sell our shawls to international galleries. They turn our own heritage into contraband."
To defeat the patent, we needed to establish prior art—an unbroken, undeniable paper trail proving that the process had been created, documented, and practiced by the Sandoval-Cruz family cooperative decades before *Vander & Thorne* ever drafted their bogus chemical analysis.
The cedar trunk held the evidence, but it had to be meticulously cataloged, scanned, and authenticated by independent heritage conservators before being submitted to the international arbitration tribunal in Geneva.
For three days, the academy operated like an archive under siege. Paloma worked side-by-side with Elena, deciphering the dialect notes in Great-Grandmother Rosario’s ledgers, while Mateo and I coordinated with certified forensic document examiners from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
Every recipe, every pressed flower, every swatch of thread was cataloged under high-resolution multispectral imaging to prove the antiquity of the vegetable inks and parchment fibers.
Yet, despite the security cameras Mateo had installed after our past ordeals, an unsettling feeling that we were being watched settled over the estate.
On Saturday night, around two in the morning, the courtyard motion sensors triggered a silent chime in our bedroom.
I sat up instantly. Mateo was already out of bed, pulling on a dark sweater and reaching for his heavy utility flashlight.
"Stay here," he whispered.
"Not a chance," I replied, slipping into my boots and grabbing the heavy brass fire iron from beside the hearth.
We crept silently out onto the second-story veranda. The moon was obscured by thick clouds, casting the courtyard in deep ink-blue shadows. Below, near the glass-walled archive room where the scanning equipment was set up, a thin beam of white light danced across the interior filing cabinets.
May you like
Someone was inside.
***
