CHAPTER 2 - Sylas
The filtration system of the penthouse was designed to strip the atmosphere of any human trace, maintaining a clinical, freezing equilibrium that kept my head clear. Through the floor-to-ceiling smart glass, London was a sprawling gray grid, frozen beneath the autumn clouds.
"The restructuring of the Southwark logistics is hitting a bottleneck, Mr. Vane," Vivienne Sparks said, her voice tight, formal, and entirely lacking the corporate bravado she undoubtedly used on the lower floors.
She was standing exactly three feet away from my marble desk, her red-tipped fingers clutching a data tablet like a shield.
Vivienne blinked, a faint, ugly blotch of nerves rising beneath her flawless makeup. "We had a minor error, sir. It was handled internally. One of the junior tech-assistants caught a three-millisecond lag in the firewall script and optimized it manually before clearing the queue."
I finally lifted my eyes. My gaze caught hers, heavy and cold, until she looked down at the carpet.
"A three-millisecond lag," I repeated softly, my long fingers tapping a slow, rhythmic pulse against the armrest. To an analyst like Vivienne, three milliseconds was background noise. To someone who actually understood the system, it was a footprint. "Who touched the script?"
"A girl from IT Security," Vivienne muttered, her posture stiffening. "Elara Guardian. She’s... eccentric, sir. A legacy hire from the old administrative pool. Her work is efficient, but she doesn't quite fit the Olympus profile."
Guardian.
The name pulled at a locked drawer somewhere in the back of my mind, a faint, structural echo from an accident that had occurred long before I took the chair at this desk.
I let the name sit in the silence of the room, watching the way Vivienne’s breathing grew shallower just waiting for my reaction.
"Monitor her," I commanded coldly, turning my chair back toward the gray expanse of the window. "If her work is efficient, leave her be. If she becomes a variable we didn't account for, bring the file directly to me. You are dismissed."
Vivienne turned on her heel, her sharp heels clicking against the marble as the glass doors slid shut behind her.
The silence rushed back into the room, heavy and absolute. I picked up the silver pen on my desk, my jaw locking as I looked down at the empty grid of the city below. The Board was meeting in an hour. Vance’s security contractors were already positioning themselves in the lower lobbies.
The pyramid was stable. But for some reason, as I stared into the gray London mist, the air in the penthouse felt entirely too thin.