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Julian Vey.

The name rings in my ears. Julian Vey co-created Dusk Protocol. Julian Vey built the world I’ve lived in for half my life. Julian Vey wrote the Sentinel’s dialogue and designed the Ember District and decided that the bartender would only grant entry after the Sentinel declared his role.

Julian Vey is here.

I bypass the Nexus booth with its triple monitors and sleek banners. I stride past Blackwater Interactive’s display of combat footage on a curved screen. Meridian Studios blurs in my peripheral vision. Someone calls after me, but it doesn’t register.

The Lantern Key Games booth sits at the far end of the row, modest compared to the others, with a single table draped in a deep purple cloth. Monitors show gameplay footage I recognize frame by frame, while art books, figurines, and the anniversary DLC box are arranged on the table.

Kain catches up to me as I stop in front of the booth. The headphones hang around my neck now, Low Tide a faint vibration along my collarbone.

Julian Vey is bent over his laptop when we arrive, but he straightens at our approach.

He’s slim, a little shorter than I expected, with warm brown skin and dark curly hair threaded with silver at the temples. Thin-framed glasses perch on his nose, which he pushes up onto his head. His designer sneakers drop from the carton they were propped on and land on the floor.

He rises to his feet, a professional smile curving his lips. “Hey, there.”

As he steps forward, I catch sight of the nape guard around his neck, and a zing of awareness shoots through me.

An Omega made Dusk Protocol.

The game that taught me how people work. The game I’ve played for fifteen years and still return to every time the real world gets too confusing.

An Omega built all of that.

My mouth works behind my mask, forming shapes with no sound. The world that taught me how to function started in the mind of the man standing before me, and the thought shorts out every circuit between my brain and my tongue.

Julian leans a hip on the table. “Congratulations on the win. That was something else.”

I stand frozen, words piling up behind my teeth, too many at once and none of them finding the exit.

Kain’s hand settles on the back of my neck, and the pressure releases the floodgate.

“I’m ZeroSignal,” I blurt.

Julian’s eyebrows shoot up, and a laugh of delight escapes him. “ZeroSignal? You’re kidding me. The one who reported the Sentinel pathing bug in Chapter Seven?”

“Yes.” Heat creeps up my neck. “That was me.”

“Holy shit.” Julian laughs, the sound bright and unfiltered. “You’ve been playing Dusk Protocol since the beginning.” He pauses, taking me in again. “You know, with how long you’ve been around, I expected you to be older.”

“I started when I was ten.”

“That explains it.” His grin returns. “And now you’re BunnyGlitch, one of the most successful competitive gamers in the scene.”

He shakes his head, still grinning. “This is the best day of my professional life.”

“The bartender’s dialogue tree is still broken,” I say. “It resets if you approach from the eastern alley after completing the weapons cache side quest. It causes a continuity error in the final cut scene where he references the Sentinel’s declaration even if you never made one.”

Julian only gets more enthusiastic. “You’re right. We fixed it in the DLC. That approach now triggers a separate branch that accounts for that cache variable.”

He leans forward, bracing his hands on the table. “But the original code was a nightmare. We had three developers arguing about it for weeks.”

“I know. I read the patch notes.”

“Of course you did. We’re in final bug cleanup now. The anniversary DLC adds about twelve hours of new content.”

He rubs the back of his neck. “I just hope we can make the deadline. We still have some pesky bugs to fix and fifteen years of forum archives to streamline.”