Page 60 of GlitchBorn Heart

Lyra didn’t breach DreamNet; she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. She didn’t use her magic to break a firewall or piggyback on corrupted code. She fell into it after she was dragged out of her happy place. My architecture caught her like it was waiting for her, hungry and impatient.

That’s the part I can’t make fit. The why.

The lab lights are still dimmed to night-cycle blue. The morning looks fuzzy until Ember turns the overheads on. I squint at the intrusion. She’s hovering around, carrying out her morning routine, checking, re-checking, heels clicking on the harsh floor of the lab.

“Good morning, sunshine!” She smiles from across the room. “There’s a TurboTea for you on the console.”

Ugh...the bubbliness. “Thanks, Mom.” I grab the cup and run my fingers through my hair. I would prefer to express myself in a different way, like with my middle finger, rather than trying to be charming in the morning.

I groggily head over to the wall of screens, breath fogging the glass like I’m standing against a window in winter. My reflection stares back at me, but it doesn’t look like me anymore. I look haunted, obsessed.

Good.

Control. That’s what it always comes down to. Control of systems, control of outcomes, control of myself.

I straighten and stretch, forcing my body back into alignment like a machine resetting after a fault. Whatever happened last night, or whatever I think happened, can be explained. Perhaps it’s not that bad, perhaps it’s sleep deprivation or a nasty whiskey hangover from self-medicating through the virus collapse. I tell myself it was a dreamscape.

Bullshit.

Lyra didn’t hack her way into my system. Technically it was Eli, and he did it without even trying. Years of building security patches, impenetrable firewalls, and encryption protocols, blown away in a matter of minutes.

This is why magic can’t be trusted.

By the dim hours of dawn, I made the call. A full system reboot was needed. Just enough to marginalize the damage without tipping Vikktor off or triggering deeper audits from the suits upstairs. Deceit wrapped in protocol. My specialty.

Before that decision, I paced like a caged wolf, contemplating the why and how of the situation. At some point the switch flipped, and instead of trying to fix my system, I began thinking of ways to try to reach her.

At first, it was simple, practical, to find a channel or a thread. Anything that would let Lyra speak to me without lighting up the grid or waking LINK to run virus patches. Communication at minimum, a compromise I could justify to myself as damage control.

But the thought wouldn’t stay simple. My mind pushed further.

What if I could pull her out?

Not just isolate her, or put her somewhere safer inside the architecture, but actually extract her. Transfer her or somehow return her to the real world like she’d never been swallowed by code at all. Remove her safely before she corrupts everything I’ve built.

The idea is absurd. It’s never been done, can’t be done. Entire corporations have collapsed chasing that particular fantasy. The best engineers, the brightest minds, all of them walking away empty-handed, their failures buried under non-disclosure agreements and corporate propaganda.

I’ve reviewed the journals. I’ve signed off on the research conclusions, and yet my mind won’t release the thought.

Not can I do it, but what if...we can. Now that we have a powerful anomaly who can use his magic to void entire networks, and another anomaly who can weave herself into the data systems, maybe she could be the exception.

Ember’s flittering around again like a butterfly in a bell jar, her nervous energy spilling into her daily lab tasks. But not me. I’m completely calm now. Forged in steel, fingers steady, heartbeat slow. This is my digital domain, and I’m the fucking king.

The feeds flicker across the wall, a mosaic of my creation. Everything is running smoothly now, code spills like rivers, glowing symbols wrap around each other in perfect rhythm. To anyone else, it’s noise. To me, it’s sublime music.

I lean forward, eyes narrowing. “Show me.” I murmur to the wall of screens, as if the system will magically respond. I must be exhausted.

“LINK—scan the system for anomalies.” I take a sip of the hot tea.

GOOD MORNING DR. RYUDON

SCANNING IN PROGRESS

LINK obeys. The anomaly pulses red against the grid, a stubborn stain in the clean fabric of my network. Most people panic when something slips through their firewall, but not me. I just smile, because this is what I was built for. Fighting, dominating, owning the code until it bends to me.

LINK pushes back, trying to erase the anomaly. “LINK—do nothing. Kill the deletion protocol.” I override her kill command. “Not today,” I whisper.

AS YOU WISH DR. RYUDON