CHAPTER 5 - Elara
Tuesday was one of those London mornings where the fog felt like a wet wool blanket.
“Morning, Elara. You're early. Again.”
It was Toby, a junior analyst from the hardware department. He was the only person at Olympus who didn't make me feel like an office mascot. He was a bit of a nerd, obsessed with old analog gear, and he usually brought me a spare pastry from the bakery near the station.
The three-millisecond lag from the day before had kept me up half the night, but I didn't mention that to him.
“Can't sleep, Toby,” I said, offering a small, tired smile as he handed me a croissant wrapped in wax paper. “The code talks to me in my dreams.”
“You need a hobby that doesn't involve electricity,” Toby joked, leaning against the edge of my partition. “I'm going to the vintage market in Brick Lane this weekend. They have some old 1970s radio transmitters. Very 'Iron Curtain' chic. You should come.”
“Maybe,” I lied. The thought of navigating a crowded market made my skin itch. “But I have a mountain of tickets to clear for Marcus.”
Toby sighed, his gaze drifting across the sterile, high-tech office. “Sometimes I think this place is too clean, Elara. You ever feel like we're just ants in a very expensive glass farm? Everything is so... monitored.”
Welcome to my world, Toby.
“I know exactly what you mean,” I offered with a small laugh. “But we’re also probably just terribly overworked.”
After Toby left, the office began to fill.
The air sharpened with the scent of Vivienne’s cold roses and the frantic energy of the senior analysts.
For the next ten hours, I was just Elara the Intern, a girl buried under a mountain of menial tasks and soul-crushing spreadsheets.
But the three-millisecond ghost was still there, whispering to me from the depths of the mainframe.
—
By 6:45 PM, the floor had bled into that eerie, late-evening stillness. The coffee machines were silent, and the fluorescent lights had shifted into their dim, power-saving purple. Most of the staff had already disappeared toward the pubs in Southwark.
My eyes were burning from the blue light of the screens, but I was fixated on a glitch I’d noticed earlier. It wasn’t a major error—just a tiny, persistent leak of data from a hidden partition labeled Reserved-Archive-00.
“What are you hiding in there?” I whispered.
My fingers flew across the keys, executing a diagnostic script I’d written at home to bypass the routine server maintenance.
I wasn't trying to hack the executives; I was just trying to clean up what I thought was messy, abandoned code.
I was almost ready to give up when it struck me: three milliseconds. Again.
I shifted my approach. I didn't use the company’s diagnostic tools this time.
Instead, I deployed a custom-built backdoor script I’d spent months perfecting—a piece of code I called The Picklock.
It was designed to mimic a routine maintenance check, slipping through the internal firewalls without leaving a trace.
My fingers moved on pure adrenaline. Layer fourteen. Layer fifteen. The encryption was dense, beautiful, and utterly terrifying. When the final lock clicked open, I didn't find a standard server log. I found an absolute surveillance nightmare.
[PROJECT ICARUS: LIVE INTERFACE]
My breath hitched. A massive global map unfurled across my monitors, covered in a web of pulsing red lines.
I clicked on a single coordinate—London, Southwark—and a list of names appeared.
It was a universal master key. Private emails, real-time heart rates, encrypted bank tokens... everything was wide open.
And then, a secondary window opened automatically. It was a high-definition video feed from the 17th-floor sanctum.
I froze.
A man was sitting in a high-back leather chair, his back to the camera. He was silhouetted against the massive floor-to-ceiling windows, the London skyline laid out before him like a conquered kingdom. He was perfectly still, the very image of a god at rest.
Sylas Vane.
I watched, paralyzed by a morbid fascination, as his hand moved toward his console. He wasn't scrolling through financial documents. He was looking at an active intrusion map.
Suddenly, a massive red banner flashed across my screen, bathing my face in a violent, bleeding crimson light.
[CRITICAL brEACH DETECTED: SECTOR 9, STATION 42]
[THREAT LEVEL: BLACK]
My blood turned to ice. He didn't know it was Elara, the intern who forgot to bring her own lunch. To the system, I was an unidentified hostile—a professional infiltrator who had just stumbled onto the crown jewels of Olympus.
On the screen, Vane didn't call for guards. He simply leaned forward, his shoulders tensing like a predator catching a scent in the dark. He began to type with a lethal, rhythmic speed.
A new command line popped up on my monitor, overwriting my entire desktop.
IDENTIFY YOURSELF.
INITIATING COUNTER-STRIKE PROTOCOL.
“No, no, no,” I whispered, my hands trembling violently.
In my panic, I reached blindly for my travel cup, trying to steady myself, but my sleeve caught the edge of the keyboard. The caramel-scented coffee erupted across the desk in a wave of sticky destruction.
Sparks hissed. The sharp smell of ozone filled my tiny cubicle as the hardware shrieked in protest.
The screen didn't die. It turned a blinding, malevolent gold. Through the flickering distortion of the damaged monitor, I saw Vane’s silhouette finally start to turn around. He was coming to see the face of the person who had dared to touch his world.
The speakers on my desk crackled with a voice that was cold, deep, and absolutely merciless.
“Whoever you are, you just made the last mistake of your life.”
I lunged beneath the desk, grabbed the thick power cord, and ripped it from the wall, plunging my corner into total darkness. But as I stood there in the sudden, deafening silence, I saw the small white light of my integrated webcam linger for a fraction of a second too long.
He didn't have my name yet. But he had a snapshot of my face, illuminated by the golden glow of a dying screen.
I didn't grab my coat. I just ran into the fog.