Leo frowned. "That sounds like a virus wrapped in a lawsuit."

"It's also our only shot."

Maya leaned in. "What if the timecode isn't missing? What if it's just mislabeled? Try offset +1 frame."

And there, at the 01:22:14:03 mark, Clip 409. The veteran's weathered face, voice cracking: "For one night, we were not enemies. We were just men, singing."

"Then we rebuild," Leo said, though his stomach clenched. Rebuilding meant re-syncing audio, re-cutting every transition, re-matching the color grades that had taken him three sleepless nights. It was impossible.

Leo stared at the corrupted timeline. Red error messages pulsed like a warning siren across his monitor:

She pulled up a dark, minimalist forum on her laptop. The header read: "There’s a guy. Calls himself Tombstone . He builds custom scripts to extract edit decision lists from locked EZP files."