5. Chapter Five #2
The door unlocks beneath my biometric seal. I step inside and stop. The room has changed.
Percy’s holographic display fills the workspace, casting shifting blue light across the walls. The integrated terminals have been repositioned. Cables now run across the desk in patterns that appear chaotic until I follow them long enough to recognize an underlying order.
The human female sits cross-legged in the desk chair, shoes abandoned somewhere beneath the workstation. Her bare feet are tucked beneath her, and the ceramic mug rests within easy reach of her right hand. Fresh steam curls from the cup.
Her glasses are pushed into her hair. Her fingers move rapidly across the interface. For a moment she doesn’t notice me. Then she looks up. Her concentration vanishes and something harder settles into its place.
Anger.
Held tight enough that most people would miss it. “You locked me in.”
“I did.”
“I’m not a prisoner.”
“You’re an uncleared contractor in a facility that houses intelligence operations, three levels below a man who would reclassify you as property if he discovered your capabilities.
” I set the food containers on the desk beside Percy.
I shook my head. I was calling her datapad by his — its — name.
“The lock is temporary. The consequences of others finding you aren’t. ”
A flush climbs her throat and her eyes gleam.
She’s furious. Glorious with it. The anger burns hot for a moment, then something underneath it shifts.
She turns the problem over in her head, searching for a flaw in my reasoning, and when she fails to find one, the change reaches me in the chemistry of her scent.
Bitter.
Reluctant.
Acceptance.
“Don’t do it again without telling me.” She reaches for the nearest food container and opens it. “What is this?”
“Protein. I don’t know what humans prefer.”
She examines the contents and selects a piece. I wait for a verdict I shouldn’t be invested in.
She takes another bite. Why can’t I stop watching her mouth close around the morsel I brought her? “I haven’t had real protein in weeks.”
Just as I thought. The admission is small and unguarded, and it slips past her defenses in a way I suspect she wouldn’t have permitted if she weren’t hungry.
She was dying where she lived. Not the dramatic version.
The slow erosion of a body running out of resources.
If she’d died, her body would have been thrown into the depths of the Splits and another being would have been in her lodgings within minutes.
I push the thought aside. She’s here now. She’s fed and breathing filtered air and her lungs won’t deteriorate further. I’m protecting the House’s investment. That’s all.
“What are you doing?”
No glance up from the display. “My job.” Her fingers trace a pathway across Percy’s holographic render, and the amber annotations she’s layered over my network’s blue architecture glow between us. “You might have locked me in here, but you didn’t tell me not to start.”
I pull a chair beside her workstation and sit, taking in the detailed construction on her display, amazed and horrified that she’s gotten so far in a short time.
“Your security looks solid on the surface,” she says, tapping a section of the display.
“Every part of your network is walled off from the others, separate passwords, separate access. Textbook intelligence structure.” She expands a subsection, rotating it so I can see the connections she’s traced.
“But underneath all of that, there’s a shared foundation layer.
Think of it as the plumbing running beneath separate rooms. The original designers probably never realized they’d built a hallway connecting every room in the house.
Someone who finds that hallway could move anywhere in the network without opening a single locked door. ”
I purse my lips. “You found that? In an hour?”
The eye-roll she barely holds in tells me exactly what she thinks of the question.
“I found that in the first twenty minutes. The rest of the time I’ve been mapping how far the hallway reaches.
” A secondary display opens, and she stabs a finger at the screen.
“It’s everywhere, in case you’re interested.
Every walled-off section of your network sits on top of the same shared foundation.
There isn’t a single room in this house that hallway doesn’t touch. ”
Every wall I’d built to keep my operatives safe has been sitting on top of a hallway I didn’t know existed, and it’s been there since the day the original designers laid the foundations. Could this be how I’m being attacked?
“And my current monitoring system doesn’t flag movement?”
She rotates the display, tracing a pathway through the amber web. “You’d have no idea anyone had been inside. From the surface, every section looks sealed.”
The breach would be invisible. The word drops through me with the weight of everything Resh laid out in the operations room.
“Could you tell if someone has already walked through it?”
She’s reading the shift in my tone, the moment this stopped being a theoretical conversation. “Someone covering their tracks would have tried to sweep up behind them, but digital movement is never perfectly clean. Go deep enough and the evidence is always there.”
Her gaze sharpens. “You’re not asking me about a design flaw. You’re telling me someone is already inside your network.”
She’s close now, close enough that the clean scent of her skin cuts through the ambient pheromone blend. Close enough that I count the individual lashes framing those dark eyes.
The intelligence operative in me says give her nothing beyond what’s operationally necessary. My gut says she’s my only option.
Give her everything and she finds the mole faster. I’m certain of that.
Give her everything and she finds Selin too.
Not the name. Not immediately. The trail.
The missing pieces. The records that don’t quite line up.
And once she starts pulling on that thread, she follows it all the way to the end.
To a dead operative buried beneath months of scrubbed data.
To the reality of what happens inside House Sethrak when someone learns the wrong thing.
No.
She doesn’t need that.
I give her the architecture instead. The traffic patterns. The routes moving beneath the network. Enough to find the breach. Enough to trace the intrusion. The method, not the casualties. Let her hunt the door without seeing what’s waiting on the other side of it.
It’s a sensible boundary.
The problem is Miro.
To map a system this large, she has to account for every piece that belongs. Every access pattern. Every behavioral profile. Every person moving through the network.
And when you account for everything that should be there, eventually you notice what’s missing. The absence starts to take shape. A gap in the traffic. A profile that stops. A space in the records where someone used to be.
Most people would miss it.
Miro won’t.
So I give her the shape and nothing under it.
“People who should have been protected by the safeguards I designed have been exposed. If the substrate is how they’re moving to find my people, I need you to trace their path.
Where they’ve been, what they’ve accessed, and where the traffic originates. ”
She’s quiet for a beat. Blue light from Percy’s display catches the lenses of her glasses, and behind them her eyes sharpen with concentration. The change reaches me in the air a moment later, the scent of anger giving way to something cooler and more focused.
“If you want me to go that deep, I’ll need the access logs for every cell junction going back to when the designers built the system.”
I run my tongue along my lower lip and draw the air between us across my palate. The heat-sensing pits along my jaw catch the rise in temperature across her forehead and throat. Concentration. Her attention has narrowed completely onto the problem in front of her.
No deception. No hidden agenda. Everything about her points to the same conclusion. She’s exactly what she appears to be: a technician faced with a puzzle she can’t resist solving.
And beneath that intense focus, her scent lingers in my lungs. Warm. Distinctly hers. Untouched by the engineered pheromone blends that saturate the Warrens. The purity of it catches my attention in a way I have no interest in examining.
I straighten so quickly the chair scrapes against the floor.
She flinches. It’s a tiny movement, gone almost as soon as it appears. I don’t like that she flinched at all. The reaction sits wrong somewhere beneath my ribs, a protest I have no business feeling. I kill it. She should be scared of me. There is no other feeling she should have toward me.
“I can do better than access logs.” I keep my tone even, as though the last few seconds didn’t happen.
“The network junction points are housed in the lower levels. Physical hardware connects the cells you’ve been mapping.
You’ll understand the system faster if you see the infrastructure for yourself. ”
I cross to the door and unlock it with my wrist comm. The corridor stretches beyond.
“Come with me.”
The junction points route through the lower levels, and the fastest path cuts through the commercial district.
She falls into step beside me with Percy’s case tucked beneath one arm, her attention already moving over the corridor architecture. Measuring. Assessing.
The panels shift from gold to copper as we descend. Silk drapery ripples in the ventilation currents. Music drifts through the corridors in a register designed to soothe, lowering defenses before the mind has time to object. She’s immune to all of it.
Her attention remains fixed on the structural seams where the original mining colony meets the carved stone overlay. I find myself watching her study my territory, which is a distraction I should have more control over than I do.