Chapter 27 Asher #2
“Forty minutes,” I calculate. “To fully isolate Greg’s backdoor and patch it.”
“We have an hour and a half on the timer,” Tessa says, her voice gaining a little strength even though she is actively clutching her stomach. “You can do it, Asher.”
Her pure belief in me acts like a drug, sharpening my focus to a razor’s edge. I dive completely into the code, my world narrowing down entirely to syntax and logic.
For twenty agonizing minutes, the room is completely silent except for the rapid clatter of my typing and the steady hum of the cooling fans.
Then, a sudden sound cuts right through the digital hum.
A soft, strangled gasp.
I violently spin my chair around.
Tessa is slumped forward in her chair, her forehead resting heavily on the edge of my desk. Her hands are gripping the wood with enough force to drain the blood completely from her fingers.
“Tessa?” Owen is there instantly, crouching beside her. “Hey, hey. Look at me.”
She lifts her head. Her face is a sickly gray, and thick sweat is beading at her hairline.
“I’m… sorry,” she whispers. “I just… the screen… the scrolling…”
She gags.
It is a visceral, wet sound. She claps a hand over her mouth, her eyes going wide with absolute panic.
“Trash can,” I bark at Ethan.
Ethan grabs the metal wastebasket from the corner and slides it over just as Tessa lurches forward. She doesn’t throw up, but she dry heaves, her small frame convulsing violently with the effort. It sounds painful.
It sounds entirely wrong.
I am out of my chair in a microsecond. I drop to my knees beside her, completely ignoring the code, ignoring Nebula, and ignoring the fifty million dollars.
“Tessa,” I say, my voice low and urgent as I put a hand on her back. She is burning up, or maybe she is freezing—her temperature regulation is completely haywire. “Breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth.”
“I can’t,” she gasps, hot tears leaking from her eyes. “I’m dizzy. The room’s spinning.”
“Your blood pressure is bottoming out,” I say, grabbing her shoulders. “We need to get you horizontal.”
“No,” she protests weakly, trying to stubbornly push herself up. “I have to finish the statement… Markus…”
“Screw Markus,” Ethan snarls, looking entirely terrified. I have seen Ethan face down hostile boardrooms and angry ex-commanders without flinching, but I have never seen this expression on his face.
Helplessness.
“Asher, the screen,” Owen says, his voice incredibly tight.
I look up.
[Unknown User]: Oops. Did I hit a nerve? I see activity slowing down. Giving up? Releasing the first batch in 10 minutes.
“Ten minutes?” I snarl. “He said two hours.”
“Nebula is accelerating the timeline,” Ethan says. “They want us dead right now.”
“Asher,” Tessa whispers, grabbing my wrist. Her grip is incredibly weak and clammy. “Go back. Fix it. Please. Don’t let them destroy Mosaic. It’s… it’s our family.”
Her eyes lock fiercely onto mine. Hazel, terrified, and totally desperate. She loves this company. She loves us.
She is explicitly asking me to save the thing we built.
I look at the screen. The countdown timer sits at 09:59.
I look back at Tessa. She is violently trembling. She is sick. She is scared.
Logic dictates that I return to the keyboard. The probability of saving the company drops by four percent for every second I am not typing. The rational choice is to prioritize the many over the one.
But I am not rational anymore. Not when it comes to her.
“Owen,” I command, my voice maintaining an icy calm. “Take my seat.”
“What?” Owen blinks in shock. “I can’t code like you. I can’t stop Greg.”
“I don’t need you to stop him,” I say. “I need you to stall. Flood the port with junk data. DDOS the Nebula server. Buy me time.”
“Where are you going?” Ethan asks.
I stand up, easily scooping Tessa into my arms. She feels alarmingly light against my chest.
“I am taking her home.”
“Asher!” Tessa protests, struggling weakly against my hold. “No! You can’t leave. The code… the breach…”
“The code can wait,” I state, looking down at her. “You cannot.”
“Asher, are you absolutely insane?” Ethan snaps, stepping aggressively in front of me. “We have ten minutes before a catastrophic leak. If you leave now, we lose everything.”
I look my older brother dead in the eye. “Ethan. Look at her.”
Ethan looks down, finally seeing the heavy sweat, the pallor, and the way she is curled into my chest like a wounded bird. His jaw furiously works as the CEO mask fully cracks, revealing the terrified brother underneath.
“She’s sick,” Ethan says, his voice rough. “We can call a doctor directly to the office. You need to be on that keyboard.”
“She isn’t just sick,” I say. I don’t know how I know, but the data points are converging into a pattern. “She is in distress. And I’m not keeping her in a high-stress environment while she’s physically collapsing.”
“I’m fine,” Tessa wheezes, even though her head lolls limply against my shoulder. “Put me down, Ash. Please. Save the app.”
“No,” I say.
I turn back to the monitors, lean over to shift Tessa’s weight to one arm, and type a rapid string of commands with my free hand. It’s a vapor lock—a quarantine protocol that completely severs the database from the interface.
To the users, the app will just look like it is loading indefinitely with spinning wheels, lag, and timeouts. It will not look like a crash; it will look like high traffic congestion. It temporarily saves our reputation, but it physically cuts the data flow and instantly stops the leak.
DATA QUARANTINE INITIATED flashes across the terminal in bold green text.
“You lobotomized it,” Owen says, staring blankly at the screen. “The app is a zombie. It’s technically running, but there’s no brain.”
“I bought us an hour,” I say. “The database is entirely air-gapped. The hacker cannot steal what he cannot access.”
“Asher,” Ethan exhales, rubbing a heavy hand down his face. “Sterling is going to flay us alive.”
“Let him,” I say.
I carry her straight out of the server room. We pass the silent, highly confused bullpen where developers are staring blankly at their frozen screens, blow past the reception desk, and walk out into the thick, humid Austin heat.
The world outside is incredibly noisy with honking cars, construction drilling, and shouting pedestrians. But as I gently settle Tessa into the passenger seat of my car and securely buckle her in, the noise completely fades.
She is safe.
I slide into the driver’s seat, my hands violently shaking—not from the hack or the impending threat of bankruptcy, but because for a solid ten seconds back in that room, watching her heave into a trash can, I felt a paralyzing fear that I did not have an algorithm to process.
I start the car.
“Asher?” she whispers, keeping her eyes closed as her head leans back against the leather seat.
“I am here,” I say, gripping the steering wheel.
“Thank you,” she says softly. “For choosing me.”
“It was not a choice,” I tell her, shifting the car into gear. “It was the only logical outcome.”
I drive.
I leave the quarantined building far behind. I leave Nebula locked in a digital empty room. Because the only thing that actually matters is sitting right next to me, and for the very first time in my life, I don’t need a computer to tell me what to do.
We arrive at my apartment in exactly ten minutes. I help her inside. She is still unsteady, her weight leaning heavily against my side.
“Bedroom,” I say, guiding her slowly down the hall.
“I just need to lie down for a second,” she says. “Then I can work from my phone.”
“You are not working,” I say, plucking her phone from her hand and placing it on the kitchen counter as we pass. “You are resting.”
I bring her into the bedroom. It is cool and dark. I pull back the duvet—gray silk, high thread count, chosen specifically for its advanced cooling properties.
“Shoes,” I say gently.
She sits on the edge of the bed and kicks off her heels, looking incredibly small in the middle of the large mattress.
“I feel terrible,” she admits, her voice muffled as she lies back. “I ruined absolutely everything. You should be there.”
“I am exactly where I need to be,” I say.
I go to the bathroom, dampen a washcloth with cool water, and return to sit on the edge of the bed. I carefully place the cloth on her forehead.
She sighs, a long, shuddering sound. “That feels really good.”
I quietly watch her. I count her breaths. In. Out. In. Out. Eighteen per minute. Still slightly elevated, but steadily slowing down.
“Tessa,” I say quietly.
“Hmm?” She keeps her eyes completely closed.
“This is not a bug,” I say. “You have been isolated for two full days. You are actively avoiding coffee. You are nauseous in the afternoon, not just the morning. You are dizzy.”
Her breath hitches, and the steady rhythm breaks.
“It’s just stress, Asher,” she says, but her vocal cords tighten and her eyes dart down to the left—a classic deception micro-expression.
“I track variables, Tessa,” I say softly, reaching out to take her hand. Her pulse thrums rapidly against my fingertips. “I notice patterns. Your caloric intake has shifted. Your sleep cycles are disrupted. You are highly emotional.”
She opens her eyes. In the dim light, they are wide and totally vulnerable.
“What are you saying?” she whispers.
“I am saying that my data suggests…” I pause. The word feels far too big for the room, and far too big for my logical, highly ordered life. “It suggests a physiological anomaly.”
She stares at me. She doesn’t deny it, and she doesn’t pull her hand away.
“Asher…” she starts, her voice trembling.
She is about to tell me. I can see it. The truth is sitting right there on her lips.
But before she can speak, a loud ping echoes from the kitchen.
My phone. A priority alert.
Then another. And another.
“The quarantine is lifting,” I say, the fragile spell breaking. “The system is coming back online.”
Tessa sits up, raw panic flooding back into her face. “The hacker. Did Owen pull the plug?”
“I don’t know,” I say, standing up as the warrior mode fully re-engages. “Stay here. Rest.”
“Asher,” she calls out as I walk to the door.
I stop. “Yeah?”
“We’ll talk,” she says, her voice thick with heavy emotion. “When this is over. We’ll talk.”
“Understood,” I say, giving a sharp nod.
I close the door, leaving her in the absolute safety of the dark. I walk into the living room and grab my laptop, sitting on the couch to crack my knuckles. The screen glows bright blue, illuminating the empty room.
System Reboot Complete. Firewall: Active. Confessions Database: Secure.
A message flashes brightly in the terminal.
[Unknown User]: Well played. You flipped the board. But tell Ethan to watch his back. The toll is still due. My eyes narrow.
Vance is going to keep coming for us.
The connection severs, and they are gone.
I lean back, the heavy adrenaline crashing rapidly out of my system. We survived. The blackmail failed, and the Confessions are safe.
But as I look down the dark hallway toward the bedroom where Tessa is sleeping, I realize the real crisis has not even started yet.
I pull up a new window, opening my personal log where I strictly track the Unit’s vitals.
Subject: Tessa. Symptoms: Pallor, Tremors, Nausea, Dizziness, Acute Stress Response.
I stare at the data points, aligning the physical symptoms with the exact timeline of our behavioral shifts over the last month. The variables converge rapidly, locking together to form a singular, irrefutable biological pattern.
The realization hits me with enough force to knock the air completely from my lungs.
I aggressively close the window before the thought fully forms.
The variable remains undefined.
And I need absolute proof.