Chapter 85 Lance Levine
Lance Levine
Location: Control Core
Time: Same
“I’m in.”
The words come easy.
Because getting here—
That was the hard part.
The control core is exactly what I expected.
Minimalist.
Centralized.
Every system routed through a single, elegant architecture.
Kade didn’t build redundancy.
He built perfection.
Which means he built vulnerability.
My fingers move across the interface, slipping past security layers that think they’re invisible.
They’re not.
Not to me.
“I’m inside his primary control lattice,” I say. “No resistance yet.”
Of course not.
He doesn’t think anyone can reach this far.
That’s about to change.
I start cutting power.
Not randomly.
Not aggressively.
Surgically.
A flicker here.
A delay there.
Subsystems dropping just enough to look like strain.
Not sabotage.
Failure.
The kind of failure that makes a man like Kade trust his own system—
right up until it betrays him.
“Backup generators will kick in in ninety seconds,” I say, watching the cascade begin to bend.
Ronan’s voice cuts in, sharp with recognition.
“You’re forcing a diagnostic loop.”
“Exactly.”
Make the system question itself.
Make it call him.
Cal’s voice follows, calm and deadly.
“Which means…”
I lean back slightly, eyes tracking the response patterns as they tighten around the core.
“He’s about to leave his hole.”
And when he does—
He won’t be thinking about us.
He’ll be thinking about his system.
His control.
His failure.
Which is exactly when we take everything from him.