Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Zadie had been staring at the same six waypoints for forty minutes, and they still weren't telling her a story that made sense.
The GPS data spread across the center monitor in a crude scatter—six pins dropped on a topographical map of the BC interior, pulled from the navigation system they’d retrieved during the Ramsey operation.
She'd run every extraction tool she had on the vehicle's onboard system, scraped cached routes, recovered deleted destinations, and cross-referenced timestamps against satellite imagery. This was all it had to give.
Coulter leaned against the edge of the second desk with his arms crossed. Neve sat on the desk with her favorite mug in hand. Scout stood in front of the screen, staring at it with her arms folded across her chest. The woman couldn't think while sitting down.
"I’m still working on trying to pull more waypoints and other data," Zadie said. "I’ve got timestamps of how long the vehicle stopped, but not much more."
"I don't understand it." Scout tapped two of the waypoints. "These are long stretches of road in the middle of nowhere. Nothing’s out there." She moved her finger to a third pin. "Coulter and I sat on this one at five this morning."
"For over an hour," Coulter added. "We saw three cars and one bear."
"Fifty miles between structures." Scout dropped her hand to her side. "There’s nothing here to stake out."
"So, what were Ramsey's people doing there?" Neve asked.
"That’s what Coulter and I kept asking each other all morning." Scout turned. "But that vehicle was at some of these waypoints for a good forty minutes to an hour."
"I can poke around on the dark web," Zadie said. "See if there’s any chatter about weird shit going down in these areas."
"I can help with that." Gideon's voice rolled into the room like hot honey. He strolled in with his hands in his pockets and a relaxed stride that she hadn’t seen from him since…
ever. His hair was damp and pushed back from his face.
He wore clothes that were actually clean, and the dark circles under his eyes had disappeared.
"Could any of those spots be connected to your telemetry system?" Coulter asked.
Gideon walked up to the screen and stood where Scout had been, his gaze focused on the information, while Zadie couldn’t seem to peel her eyes off him.
She tried blinking. She tried shifting in her chair.
She even tried reaching for her drink. But all she could do was stare at the sexy legend she’d been admiring from a distance for years.
"At first glance, it doesn’t appear so." Gideon tilted his head slightly.
"But I'd need to overlay these against my ETHER map to know for sure.
I built ghost routes into the network—false pathways designed to mislead anyone trying to map the system from the outside.
Decoys that look like real data corridors but carry nothing.
I'd need to strip those out before I could tell you whether any of these waypoints sit on actual infrastructure. "
"How long would that take?" Neve asked.
"Couple of hours."
"Then we'll get out of your way." Neve jumped off the desk. "Let us know when you've got something."
"Scout, do you have twenty minutes?" Coulter pushed off the desk. "I want to go over the perimeter check."
"I thought you’d never ask." Scout followed Neve and Couter out into the corridor, and the room settled into the low hum of electronics and recycled air.
Zadie exhaled and leaned back in her chair. The monitor glowed with six stubborn, silent dots.
Gideon didn't sit down right away. He stood in front of the screen with his hands on his hips. "You think there’s something to these waypoints?"
"Ramsey and his men were scrubbing the vehicle. They didn’t want anyone to know where it had been. If we’re going to take down Finch, we need to understand more than just the enhanced soldiers."
"I created my system to save lives. To go hand in hand with what Darwin was doing.
" He turned, grabbed the second chair, and rolled it next to her desk. Close enough that his knee brushed hers when he sat down. "Not to create supercharged soldiers who’ll end up suffering catastrophic side-effects and die because Finch doesn’t understand the science. " He ran his fingers through his hair.
"That keeps most of us up half the night."
"I can understand why." He rested his forearms on the edge of her desk, fingers loosely laced. "I want to get into ORACLE."
Zadie's hands stilled on the keyboard. "Last time we talked about this, you told me it couldn't be done."
"I told you it couldn't be done the way you were trying to do it. And I told you I'd sleep on it."
"That was two days ago."
"I'm a slow sleeper." He unfolded his hands and leaned back. "You got inside ORACLE. You got three layers deep before the AI flagged you and started moving everything. Most people wouldn't have made it past the first perimeter."
"I still got chased out, and now I can’t get back in."
"My point is, you got in." He tapped his finger on her knee. "The AI is the gatekeeper. Nothing gets past it, because nothing is supposed to. But every AI system has limitations."
"Because they’re built by humans, and they can’t truly think."
"That’s part of it," Gideon said. "This system is one of the most sophisticated ever built. It creates shadow servers, reroutes data, dumps everything to secure partitions. It's fast, and it's relentless. But all of that processing power is reactive. It responds to what it detects."
"Wait a second." A flutter rose in her chest. "Are you trying to tell me it can’t chase two things at once?"
"It’s not that it can’t, but if it detects two simultaneous threats from different vectors, it has to prioritize. And it will always prioritize the one that looks more dangerous."
She leaned back and swiveled in her chair. "So, we both hack from what appears to be different IPs. One of us goes for the inner circle, making it look like we’re going for major data, while the other one crawls on the floor and finds a way in."
"Something like that," he said. "We need one of us to make the kind of noise that looks like a full-scale breach attempt.
Real traffic patterns, authenticated-looking credential pings, enough volume that the AI commits every resource it has to tracking and containing it.
" Gideon's hands moved. Palms open with his fingers mapping invisible architecture in the air between them.
Zadie had seen engineers talk with their hands before.
She'd done it herself. But watching Gideon do it was like watching someone conduct music.
"The insertion would need to be fast. You'd have to know exactly where you're going and what you're planting before you touch the system. "
"I take it you have something in mind."
His lips curved into a smile. "Fresh authentication data. Nothing fancy, and I can show you the code where they sit in the architecture. When the AI finishes dealing with the noise I’ll be making, and scans for damage, the credentials will look native, because they are."
"Why not build new credentials?"
"The AI would quickly re-evaluate its threat assessment, deeming my noise as a deviation." He drummed his fingers on the desk. "I’d need to make a dummy server and do my best to rebuild as much code as I can. We’d need to practice because we’d only have one shot at this."
"The cipher doesn’t run on a clock. That’s makes the second part even harder."
"The only way to predict when the next window opens, is to watch it happen and read the pattern," Gideon said.
"That's going to take time. Hours, at least. On a live node that's connected to a system with an AI that already caught me once."
"Which is why the credentials have to be perfect. If the AI sees anything out of place during the monitoring phase, it flags it, and we're done. Isaac gets the alert, and he'll know what we're trying to do."
Zadie pulled her legs up and crossed them in the chair.
"Once you've read the cipher timing, then we have to find the hardware key?
" This was more than a question. It was dedication.
It was a commitment. And she had no right asking him to make it.
He didn't have to stay in this bunker. He hadn't been pronounced dead like the rest of them.
Nor was he hiding from the law like Darwin.
If he stayed, he'd be making a commitment, one he wouldn't take lightly.
"The new credentials, once it hooks into the software cipher at the node and we pull data, and we see enough of it, I’ll be able to see which hubs have physical keys," he said.
"And once both keys activate?"
"We're inside ORACLE. Not the whole thing, but we'd be inside the core. And from the core, we’d be past the initial AI."
"Are you telling me there’s more?"
He nodded. "Each department has its own AI protection system. But as long as the new credentials hold, we’d have a jumping off point."
Zadie stared at the monitor. The six waypoints blinked back at her, still mute, still meaningless.
But behind them, behind everything on this screen, ORACLE sat like a locked vault in the center of a system built to protect secrets that were now being used to destroy lives.
She'd been throwing herself against it for weeks.
What she’d needed was the other half of the equation. And he was sitting right next to her, smelling like soap and talking with his hands. If he kept explaining architecture to her with that sultry voice of his, she was going to have a problem that had nothing to do with firewalls.
"This is brilliant. You’re brilliant."
"It only has a chance of working because of you," he said.
"I can draw the map. I can show you how to get inside, but I’m not smart enough to outrun my system.
In order to make this work, we need someone who can write code under pressure, adapt on the fly, and not panic when the AI fights back.
That's not something I can do at your level. "
"You really know how to sweet-talk a girl."
"I'm being serious."
"I know you are." She shifted her gaze and found herself staring into his deep blue eyes. "That's why it's working."
The room quieted except for the soft tick of the monitor on standby. The blue light from the screen caught the angles of his face and the scratch on his cheekbone that had started to fade.
Her hand was on the armrest. His was on the edge of her desk, three inches from hers.
"You don't have to stay and help us do this."
"Outside of the fact you need my help, I need to do this. I want to do this."
"Then we should probably start mapping the credential structure," she said.
"Probably." He leaned closer and licked his lips.
Her palms went damp like she was a schoolgirl under the bleachers about to be kissed for the first time.
"We keep getting interrupted," he said. "It's becoming a pattern."
"Patterns can be broken."
His hand came off the desk and found the side of her face. His palm was warm. His fingers curved around her jaw, and he kissed her. It wasn’t tentative. Or slow. Or even teasing. It was hot. And hard. And wild.
She gripped the front of his shirt and pulled him closer. Her chair rolled. His knee pushed between hers and his fingers slid into the hair at the base of her neck.
Someone cleared their throat and then coughed. "Excuse me," a faint whisper from a familiar female voice, said.
He rested his chin on the top of her head.
"We should’ve closed the door," she whispered.
"Hindsight."
"Dinner's ready," Wynn said. "But if you want to continue ki—"
"We’re coming." Zadie didn’t bother moving.
Neither did Gideon.
"Don’t let me stop you." Wynn pushed off the doorframe, and Zadie could hear her laughing all the way down the corridor.
"If I don’t go to dinner, someone’s going to have something to say about that." Gideon rubbed the back of his neck. "And if I go, I have a feeling everyone’s gonna have something to say about what Wynn just saw."
"Oh yeah." Zadie stood, brushing her hands across her thighs. "We might as well get it over with.