Chapter Six
MIRO
Percy’s display throws amber light across the workstation in shifting patterns, and the audit data scrolling beneath my fingers is the most complicated architecture I’ve touched since Helix Corp.
I’ve been at this since the lights shifted from the Warrens’ night cycle into morning. Sleep didn’t happen. It rarely does in unfamiliar places. New environments come with unfamiliar sounds, unfamiliar routines, too many unknowns for my brain to ignore. By the time I’d identified every noise in the ventilation system and mapped the quickest route from the apartment to the nearest emergency exit, the lights were changing and there seemed little point pretending I was going to rest.
The bed behind me is better than anything I ever had in the Splits. Real linens. Actual woven fabric instead of synthetic blends designed to survive industrial laundering. I stared at the luminous ceiling panels, listening to the filtration unit and trying not to think about how good the air tasted. Clean air. Real food still settling in my stomach from last night. A workstation with integrated displays that make my jury-rigged setup back home look primitive.
Helix gave me those things too, once. The office with a view. The expensive chair designed to support twelve-hour workdays. Coffeethat didn’t taste like burnt chemicals. A salary that meant my parents stopped checking their account balances before buying groceries.
I pull my attention back to the hologram before the memory can settle. Comfort has a purpose. It always does. Give people enough of it and they stop looking too closely at the systems providing it. The nicer the cage, the easier it becomes to forget it’s a cage at all.
“Talk to me, Perce.” I tap his casing twice and lean closer. “What are we looking at in the eastern cell junctions?”
He chirps and the projection expands between us. The network substrate unfolds in layers, amber annotations glowing against the blue framework of Zavin’s original architecture.
It’s beautiful.
Which is annoying, because it’s also a disaster.
The vulnerability runs through every junction point in the system. Yesterday I saw the physical hardware for myself, the connection nodes hidden beneath all the compartmentalization, and the infrastructure matches what Percy and I pulled from the schematics.
The hardware is old. Older than most of the network layered over the top of it. Each junction node still maintains its own local buffer, keeping a physical record of every handoff that passes through. These logs sit on storage that was never connected to the central monitoring systems, a relic from an earlier generation of infrastructure.
By modern standards, they’re effectively invisible. Nobody uses them. Nobody needs to. The live network reports activity in real time, and the local buffers just keep quietly recording in the background. As far as House Sethrak’s systems are concerned, they’re little more than forgotten redundancy.
Every cell shares the same routing layer. Buried deep enough that most people would never know it’s there. Deep enough that whoever designed the system probably forgot about it years ago.
Whoever is bleeding his network isn’t fighting the architecture. They’re using it.
The substrate layer sits so far beneath the operational systems it may as well be invisible. Whoever is doing this knows exactly where to walk and exactly where nobody is looking. They’re moving through the network the same way I move through unsecured systems. Quietly. Leaving nothing obvious behind.
“We’re going to need the junction access logs.” I highlight a cluster of anomalies in the eastern cells and flick the data toward Percy. “The handoff records between cells four through nine.”
Percy chirps.
“Yes, I’m sure.”
I zoom in on the traffic patterns. The discrepancy jumps out immediately. Once I noticed it, I couldn’t stop seeing it.
“Look at the load distribution. The western junctions are balanced. Every cell is producing roughly what you’d expect and the traffic evens out across the network.” My fingertip traces the eastern nodes. “These aren’t.”
The heavier traffic forms a faint signature across the projection. Not enough to trigger alerts. But enough to matter.
I expand the routing data and study what’s spreading in front of me. The more I look at it, the less I like it. The excess traffic is real. It’s not a reporting error and it’s not an operational anomaly. Something is moving through the network that shouldn’t be there, slipping beneath the monitoring systems entirely.
“That’s how they’re doing it.”
Percy’s hologram shifts as he processes the conclusion.
The substrate layer sits underneath everything else, buried so deep most operators would never think to look at it. Anyone monitoring the standard systems would see exactly what they’re expected tosee: routine operations, normal traffic, nothing worth investigating. Meanwhile, something else is moving through the architecture unnoticed, hidden in a place the network itself has forgotten exists.
I lean back in my chair and rub at my eyes.
The filtration unit hums softly behind me. Every breath fills my lungs without the metallic bite that’s been part of the air for as long as I can remember. I’ve been here less than a day and my body has already noticed the difference. The headache that followed me through the Splits for weeks has faded to a dull shadow. My thoughts are moving faster. Cleaner. I’ve spent the entire morning working through audit data without losing my place once.
The realization leaves an unpleasant taste in my mouth.
