Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Bane
The clubhouse was quiet in the early morning hours, that dead time between three and five AM when even the most dedicated delinquents had finally stumbled to bed.
I sat hunched over my workstation, the glow of the monitors casting my face in shades of blue and silver, my fingers flying across the keyboard with practiced efficiency.
The corrupted files had been bothering me for days.
Not in an urgent way—nothing that compromised the immediate integrity of the DNA database—but in a persistent, nagging way that made the back of my neck itch every time I thought about it.
Like an itch you couldn’t quite reach. I’d been running diagnostics since midnight, expecting to find the usual suspects: degraded code, overwritten sectors, fragmentation from repeated access and deletion cycles.
What I found instead made me pause.
The corruption—if you could even call it that—wasn’t random.
It wasn’t the disorganized mess I’d expected.
It was structured. Organized. The kind of pattern you only saw when something was deliberately placed, carefully encrypted, designed to look like corruption but absolutely, unmistakably intentional.
My breath caught. I leaned closer to the screen, my eyes tracking the strings of hidden code that cascaded down the display. They didn’t make sense. They weren’t supposed to be there at all. I scrolled through them, feeling the weight of something heavy settling in my chest.
L-A. L-C. H2. PREG. DORMANT.
The letters and numbers meant nothing to me in this context. They looked like variables, like shorthand for something larger, something designed to be hidden from plain sight. I muttered under my breath, “That’s not corruption. You motherfucker. What the hell did you do to my database?”
My fingers moved instinctively, pulling up deeper diagnostics, trying to trace the source code back to its origin.
I had root access to everything. I’d written most of this system myself, back when George motherfucking Stone decided he needed better record-keeping.
I knew every back door, every failsafe, every line of code that powered this digital fortress.
Which was precisely why I froze when the system locked me out.
ACCESS DENIED
The words blazed across my screen in aggressive red lettering, and I felt all the blood drain from my face.
That wasn’t possible. I had root access.
I had written the root access protocols.
Nothing—not encryption, not firewalls, not security protocols I hadn’t personally designed—should have been able to lock me out of my own system.
But it had.
I tried again. Same result. ACCESS DENIED.
My mouth went dry. My hands were shaking as I reached for my phone, then stopped.
Who the hell would I even call? Montana?
Tell him what—that someone had deliberately embedded encrypted code into our DNA database and then locked me out of my own system?
That there were variables I didn’t understand, strings of data that looked like abbreviations for things that made my blood run cold?
L-A. L-C. H2. PREG. DORMANT.
I didn’t understand what they meant. But I understood, with perfect, crystalline certainty, that whatever was hidden in that database had nothing to do with routine corruption and everything to do with something much, much darker.