Someone stole my initrd.img and vmlinuz files

[brainssssss]

Hey there! Apologies in advance - I have little doubt that this will eventually turn out to be user error.

Life is gravy and amazing --until I move the two modded kernel files into the extracted tails folder:
sudo mv /lib/live/mount/medium/live/initrd.img /lib/live/mount/medium/live/vmlinuz tails-amd64-5.9/live

Not found. Both initrd.img and vmlinuz are MIA. I've tried a couple times, starting from scratch. I went peakin around for these filenames and found them in the squashfs-root directory. I tried manually copying them over only to find out they were filled with lies and didn't seem to actually exist. Symlinking? After that rabbit hole I decided to come here.

I do recall a couple issues prior to this, unsure if related? I assumed they were not huge issues as the process still allowed me to continue. While installing the 3 kernel files into the chroot:
dpkg -i linux-libc-*.deb && \ dpkg -i linux-headers-*.deb && \ dpkg -i linux-image-*.deb

It gets pretty far along until it gives me a heads up about update-initramfs and a read-only filesystem. I can see the 3 files in chroot after it's finished, for what its worth.

And before that step, when installing all the packages:
sudo apt update && \ sudo apt install -t sid -y pahole dwarves libc-bin binutils binutils-common libbinutils binutils-x86-64-linux-gnu libzstd1 libctf0 libgprofng0 libctf-nobfd0 libjansson4 libbpf1 && \ sudo DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt install -y squashfs-tools libzstd1 libncurses5-dev libncurses-dev libssl-dev flex bison build-essential libelf-dev bc gcc zstd fakeroot kmod devscripts cpio ccache lz4 qtbase5-dev schedtool jfsutils reiserfsprogs xfsprogs btrfs-progs pcmciautils xz-utils bindgen

I'd get some drama about libc6 being unable to install because of incorrect versions of some other packages. I ended up adding Aptitude and letting it figure out all the dependencies (based off some dusty stackoverflow thread). Which it did, seemingly swimmingly! Again, absolutely unsure if this later caused my initrd and vmlinuz issues.