Sethrai encryption rotates every ninety seconds, but the rotation pattern carries a signature. Every system does. People build code, and people have habits. Habits leave patterns behind if you know where to look. This architect favors recursive layering, nesting each encryption cycle inside the previous one so the security compounds the deeper an intruder pushes. It’s elegant work. Expensive work. Most intrusion software would hit the second layer and bounce.
I don’t use intrusion software. I use Percy, four years spent designing systems very much like this at Helix Corp, and two years spent dismantling those same systems from the outside after a corporation decided my death was more cost-effective than my testimony.
The fourth layer is where the real architecture begins.
I slow my approach, trimming my data footprint down to the smallest profile possible and moving through the system the way water moves through stone. This part isn’t about speed. It’s about patience. The willingness to spend hours doing what a brute-force attack could accomplish in minutes.
Brute force leaves scars.
I’m good enough to leave nothing.
“Easy, Percy.” His processors are running hot, the whine of his cooling system climbing in pitch as I push his hardware beyond what it was designed to handle. I rest my palm against his casing until the heat begins to ease, then turn back to the interface. “I’ll buy you a new thermal regulator when we’re rich.”
He makes a sound I choose to interpret as skepticism. I push on, trying not to think that my only friend is a machine.
A fifth layer falls. The sixth parts without resistance, and the twelve-millisecond gap between the automated sweep and the manual monitoring cycle holds long enough for me to slip through and land in an administrative tier.
Holy fuck.
I’m in.
Information glides across my screen. The data is dense and meticulously organized, revealing personnel movements, communication intercepts, operational intelligence, and financial records tied to accounts the public-facing network denies exist.
I’m standing inside House Sethrak’s private architecture, and the view is breathtaking.
I mark the files I came for, mostly vulnerability assessments and security analyses that a rival house would pay a fortune to acquire, and begin the extraction through a pipeline already routed across nine proxy nodes. Percy’s display shifts to amber as the transfer starts. His processors climb into a strained whine I can hear through the casing, and every second I spend inside this network is another second closer to detection.
A seventh layer appears beneath the administrative tier. Then an eighth. I should stop. The files are already transferring, and every instinct I possess is telling me not to get greedy.
Then I notice something below the eighth layer. The architecture changes. Not dramatically. Just enough to stand out. The coding style is different. Older. More complicated. Like a second architect built this section years before the rest of the system grew around it.
Curiosity has always been one of my worst habits, and I stare at the shift a second too long.
Percy’s amber display floods red. Alerts erupt across the screen so quickly the notifications blur together. One becomes three. Three becomes seven. Then twelve. Then seventeen, cascading through monitoring systems I was too deep to notice waking up around me.
For one frozen second I stare at the cascade, trying to understand what I’ve missed.
One second.
One second I can’t afford.
Then adrenaline slams into my bloodstream hard enough to sharpen my vision and hollow out my stomach. I pull out. Abort the extraction. Sever the proxy chain. Burn the access nodes. The pathwaycollapses behind me as I retreat, destroying every foothold I used to get in and leaving as little as possible for the trace to follow home.
Percy screams a sustained warning tone I’ve heard once before, in a hotel room on Meridian Station when Helix Corp’s extraction team breached the building’s security perimeter twelve floors below me.
Red warnings cycle across his display so fast the individual alerts smear into a wall of color, and I’m typing blind, fingers severing connections and burning access nodes in the sequence I drilled for exactly this scenario.
Proxy chain severed.
Access nodes burned.
Data pipeline collapsed.
Transfer status: incomplete. Extraction: partial. Seventeen alerts active in a system designed to catch corporate intelligence operatives, not a freelance hacker working out of a refugee apartment on borrowed bandwidth.
I pull back from the interface, and the silence that follows is the loudest sound in the room.
Percy’s display settles from red to amber, the warning tone fading into a low, distressed hum I’ve never heard him make before. I gather him against my chest, and my heart hammers so hard I can track the individual beats through the vibration of his casing against my ribs.
