3. Chapter Three
Chapter Three
MIRO
The first security layer peels away without resistance.
Then the second. Then the third. The familiar rush of a live intrusion settles into my blood, sharpening my focus until the room fades into the background and all that remains is the system in front of me and the path waiting to be carved through it.
Percy’s display expands to full projection, data streams spilling across the room in colors I’ve assigned by priority.
Blue for structural mapping. Green for clear pathways.
Amber for caution. Red for monitoring nodes I need to avoid.
The shifting light paints my skin as I work, and the room narrows to the width of the display, the hum of Percy’s processors, and the rhythm of my fingers moving through architecture that belongs to someone very dangerous.
Sethrai encryption rotates every ninety seconds, but the rotation pattern carries a signature.
Every system does. People build code, and people have habits.
Habits leave patterns behind if you know where to look.
This architect favors recursive layering, nesting each encryption cycle inside the previous one so the security compounds the deeper an intruder pushes.
It’s elegant work. Expensive work. Most intrusion software would hit the second layer and bounce.
I don’t use intrusion software. I use Percy, four years spent designing systems very much like this at Helix Corp, and two years spent dismantling those same systems from the outside after a corporation decided my death was more cost-effective than my testimony.
The fourth layer is where the real architecture begins.
I slow my approach, trimming my data footprint down to the smallest profile possible and moving through the system the way water moves through stone. This part isn’t about speed. It’s about patience. The willingness to spend hours doing what a brute-force attack could accomplish in minutes.
Brute force leaves scars.
I’m good enough to leave nothing.
“Easy, Percy.” His processors are running hot, the whine of his cooling system climbing in pitch as I push his hardware beyond what it was designed to handle.
I rest my palm against his casing until the heat begins to ease, then turn back to the interface.
“I’ll buy you a new thermal regulator when we’re rich. ”
He makes a sound I choose to interpret as skepticism. I push on, trying not to think that my only friend is a machine.
A fifth layer falls. The sixth parts without resistance, and the twelve-millisecond gap between the automated sweep and the manual monitoring cycle holds long enough for me to slip through and land in an administrative tier.
Holy fuck.
I’m in.
Information glides across my screen. The data is dense and meticulously organized, revealing personnel movements, communication intercepts, operational intelligence, and financial records tied to accounts the public-facing network denies exist.
I’m standing inside House Sethrak’s private architecture, and the view is breathtaking.
I mark the files I came for, mostly vulnerability assessments and security analyses that a rival house would pay a fortune to acquire, and begin the extraction through a pipeline already routed across nine proxy nodes.
Percy’s display shifts to amber as the transfer starts.
His processors climb into a strained whine I can hear through the casing, and every second I spend inside this network is another second closer to detection.
A seventh layer appears beneath the administrative tier. Then an eighth. I should stop. The files are already transferring, and every instinct I possess is telling me not to get greedy.
Then I notice something below the eighth layer. The architecture changes. Not dramatically. Just enough to stand out. The coding style is different. Older. More complicated. Like a second architect built this section years before the rest of the system grew around it.
Curiosity has always been one of my worst habits, and I stare at the shift a second too long.
Percy’s amber display floods red. Alerts erupt across the screen so quickly the notifications blur together. One becomes three. Three becomes seven. Then twelve. Then seventeen, cascading through monitoring systems I was too deep to notice waking up around me.
For one frozen second I stare at the cascade, trying to understand what I’ve missed.
One second.
One second I can’t afford.
Then adrenaline slams into my bloodstream hard enough to sharpen my vision and hollow out my stomach.
I pull out. Abort the extraction. Sever the proxy chain.
Burn the access nodes. The pathway collapses behind me as I retreat, destroying every foothold I used to get in and leaving as little as possible for the trace to follow home.
Percy screams a sustained warning tone I’ve heard once before, in a hotel room on Meridian Station when Helix Corp’s extraction team breached the building’s security perimeter twelve floors below me.
Red warnings cycle across his display so fast the individual alerts smear into a wall of color, and I’m typing blind, fingers severing connections and burning access nodes in the sequence I drilled for exactly this scenario.
Proxy chain severed.
Access nodes burned.
Data pipeline collapsed.
Transfer status: incomplete. Extraction: partial. Seventeen alerts active in a system designed to catch corporate intelligence operatives, not a freelance hacker working out of a refugee apartment on borrowed bandwidth.
I pull back from the interface, and the silence that follows is the loudest sound in the room.
Percy’s display settles from red to amber, the warning tone fading into a low, distressed hum I’ve never heard him make before. I gather him against my chest, and my heart hammers so hard I can track the individual beats through the vibration of his casing against my ribs.
I’ve been seen.
A trace is already running, pulling at the thread I tried to burn behind me. The question isn’t whether they’ll find me.
The question is how much time the burned nodes bought me.
I settle Percy on the bed and start packing.
He goes into the reinforced case I keep beneath the workstation, cushioned in shock-absorbent foam I stole from a shipping container my first week in the Splits.
Backup drives disappear into the inner pocket of my jacket, flat against my body where I can track them by pressure and temperature.
Secondary devices slide into the pockets sewn into the lining of my trousers, each one returning to its designated place.
The trembling starts in my chest. I don’t let it reach my hands. The window on the far wall is twenty-two inches wide. I measured it the day I moved in. Thanks to my less-than-ideal diet, I’ll fit.
The maintenance shaft beyond it leads to a ventilation junction four levels down, and from there into the lower warrens where the Splits dissolve into unmapped service tunnels.
Everything I own fits into minutes.
Percy in his case.
Backup drives in my jacket.
Devices in my pockets.
The ceramic mug stays on the workstation.
It won’t fit, and leaving it behind costs less than the half-second it would take to decide otherwise. I reach for the window latch, and the proximity alert on the secondary screen spikes from green to red.
Shit. Someone is in the corridor. Moving toward my door. I hear the single set of footsteps, steady and unhurried, carrying the confidence of someone who isn’t searching for the right apartment.
They already know which one they want.
I grab the emergency beacon from Percy’s case and wrap my other hand around the window latch.
I wrench the latch sideways and shove Percy’s case through first, the reinforced corners scraping against the frame, and I’m halfway through the opening when the magnetic seal to my one and only door disengages.
I try to dive down the vent but an iron grip on my waist stops me.
Searing warmth radiates through the fabric of my shirt and into the skin beneath. The grip lifts me clean off the windowsill and draws me back against a chest so broad it blocks out the corridor beyond. The arm holding me is scaled, bronze in the dim light, and the strength in it feels effortless.
He’s holding me the way someone holds a glass they don’t intend to break. Not squeezing.
Containing.
Percy’s case is on the other side of the window, balanced on the maintenance shaft ledge, and the sight of it sends a spike of panic through my chest so sharp I can’t think past it.
“Let me go.” My words come out strangled, and not surprisingly, the male doesn’t let go. He tightens his hold.
His heat spreads along my shoulder blades, the curve of my spine, the small of my back.
Every point where he touches me feels impossibly warm.
Sethrai run hot. I’ve read it in cultural databases and intelligence briefings.
Reading about it and being pressed against one are entirely different experiences.
“So you can continue with your escape? I don’t think so.”
The voice comes from above and behind me, low and rough-edged. The sound vibrates through me from where I’m pinned against him, each word settling somewhere behind my ribs.
I twist in his hold and get exactly as far as he allows, which is far enough to look up and confirm what the bronze scales, the heat pouring off him, and the override code already told me.
Sethrai.
House Sethrak.
The house whose network I was inside twenty minutes ago. The house whose encryption I peeled apart layer by layer before everything went catastrophically wrong.
Bronze scales catch the blue glow of my screens and fracture the light into copper and gold. He tilts his head, the movement smooth enough that something primitive in my hindbrain immediately labels it dangerous. Amber eyes with vertical pupils find mine.
He’s not angry.
That’s the first thing I notice.
He’s not furious. He doesn’t look like a male deciding how much punishment to hand out.
He looks amused.