I give him a lopsided smirk and a two-finger salute. The doors shut, and the moment they do, my smile falls.
Twelve minutes.
That’s all it’ll take to finally make everything okay.
I fucked up.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I fucking fucked up.
All I can do now is everything in my power to make it right, to help Lane and Harrison kick this motherfucker’s ass.
My apartment is dark except for the glow of screens. There are wires everywhere, protein bar wrappers, a half empty bag of Goldfish, and empty coffee mugs that have definitely reached sentience. Felix has abandoned me for higher ground because even he knows when the energy in a room turns feral. He glares down at me from the top of the bookshelf like I personally offended him by choosing chaos today.
“He started it,” I tell the cat, referring to the man I’m supposed to be winning against. Not fuckinglosing. “If he didn’t exist, I’d be having a normal morning. Maybe eating cereal. Maybe touching grass. Okay, probably not that last one.”
Felix blinks slowly. Damn judgmental cat.
My fingers fly across my keyboard, and sweat slides down my spine.
He got through. He fucking got through.
Not my enemy, but theirs.
And not entirely, but enough. One weak point was all it took. One tiny seam in the firewall I built like a paranoid conspiracy theorist with abandonment issues. I layered it, stress-tested it, broke it, and rebuilt it. And still, he found the one spot that wasn’t perfect.
That one weak point is how they got to Lane, how they were able to take him.
And also the reason why Harrison is mostdefinitelygoing to fucking kill me.
Especially if I don’t fucking fix this.
“Okay,” I mutter, cracking my knuckles as code scrolls across three different monitors. “Okay. We adapt. We pivot. We do not spiral into a dramatic meltdown because that would be unprofessional.”
I am absolutely spiraling.
My phone starts vibrating across my desk.
Mom Calling
Of course.
I rarely miss a call from her, but I let it buzz. Lives are literally at stake.
“Love you,” I mutter to the phone as I flip it face down. “Call you when I’m done dismantling a criminal empire.”
Back to work.
The virus window is open on the center screen.
Four years of obsession. Four years of caffeine and insomnia and rage funneled into one beautiful, terrifying thing.
Four years, and now it comes down to this.
It needs to spread without being detected, without tripping automated fail-safes. It needs to suffocate the network slowly enough to avoid triggering countermeasures but fast enough to give me a window. Two minutes to drain accounts. Three or fourto erase the contingencies and an entire digital footprint. Then the rest of the time for the part that actually matters to me, the part no one hired me for.
I run one last stability check. The runtime is still tight. I reroute part of the propagation through a secondary cluster I set up months ago. It’s risky and unstable. If it crashes too early, everything collapses and I lose the window. But if I don’t, I might not get enough time.
