CHAPTER 6 - Sylas
I sat back in my chair, the leather creaking softly under my weight. Outside, London was a tapestry of grey fog and shimmering lights, but my eyes were fixed on the terminal screen in front of me.
[THREAT NEUTRALIZED: SIGNAL LOST]
"Not neutralized," I murmured to the empty room. "Just disconnected."
My fingers remained poised over the keys.
For the first time in three years, someone had bypassed the Aegis firewall.
It hadn't been a brute-force attack from a state-sponsored farm in Shanghai or a crude injection from a Russian syndicate.
This had been surgical. An elegant, almost invisible sequence of commands that had picked the lock of Project Icarus as if it were made of glass.
I felt a sharp, cold spike of adrenaline. It wasn't fear—I had forgotten how to feel that a long time ago. It was pure interest.
"Show me," I commanded.
The system responded instantly. A window unfurled, displaying the raw data captured in the millisecond before the connection was severed.
Location: Floor 9, Station 42.
Hardware: Standard Issue Workstation (Modified).
"Floor nine," I whispered, my eyes narrowing. "An inside job."
I pulled up the last frame captured by the workstation's webcam. The image was distorted by the golden glare of a short-circuiting monitor and a spray of liquid, but the detail was sharp enough.
I leaned forward, my chest tightening.
I had expected a professional. A man in a suit with a concealed drive, or perhaps a disgruntled senior architect with a vendetta.
Instead, I saw her.
A girl. Her hair was a chaotic halo of calico curls, her face pale and etched with a terror so raw it felt like a physical blow through the screen.
She was drenched—not in sweat, but in what looked like coffee.
One hand was reaching for the power cord, her eyes wide, reflecting the golden light of the breach like a trapped animal.
She looked small. She looked clumsy. She looked... impossible.
"Who are you?"
I tapped a command, sending the image to the Olympus HR database for a facial recognition match. While the system searched, I began to pull the logs from Station 42.
The more I read, the deeper the frown became. This wasn't the work of a novice. The structural logic she had used to bypass my security was high-level—an incredibly rare, flawless execution of raw system architecture.
The computer chirped. A file appeared on the screen.
[MATCH FOUND]
[NAME: GUARDIAN, ELARA]
[POSITION: JUNIOR INTERN (IT SECURITY)]
[STATUS: PROBATIONARY]
An intern.
My lips thinned into a hard, dark line as my gaze locked onto the surname. Guardian.
A sudden, sharp ripple of recognition ran through me.
I had heard that name before. Earlier that morning, Vivienne had casually dismissed a lower-floor tech-assistant for fixing a firewall lag.
But even before that, the name carried a much older, darker weight.
It was buried deep in the locked history of Olympus—connected to a structural accident that had occurred twelve years ago, long before I took this desk.
The legacy of a brilliant, dangerous couple who had crossed the wrong lines.
This wasn't a coincidence. The variable had a history.
I stood up, grabbing my charcoal overcoat from the rack.
"Vance," I said into my wrist comms.
"Yes, Mr. Vane?" my head of security replied instantly.
"Lock down the building. Floor nine, Station 42. I want every scrap of hardware from that desk in my lab within ten minutes. And Vance?"
"Sir?"
"Find out where Elara Guardian lives. And send a clean-up crew to her apartment. If she’s as smart as her code, she won't go home. But if she does... I want to be the one waiting for her."
I walked toward my private elevator, the silence of the 17th floor now feeling like the calm before a hunt.
She was a variable I hadn't accounted for. A glitch in my perfect system. And in my world, glitches aren't ignored.
They are corrected.