Chapter 16: Smoking Gun
The rain started again, a soft tap-tap on the torn metal roof of the wrecked van. Inside, the air held a persistent, metallic taste. Marcus crouched in the dim space, the glow from the cracked data pad casting his face in sharp planes of light and shadow. His fingers moved over the screen, tracing corrupted lines of code and fragmented logs.
“This isn’t a hack,” he whispered, more to himself than to Erin, who stood like a statue by the mangled doorway, her violet eyes scanning the darkness outside. “It’s a manifesto. A test flight.”
He read aloud, his voice low and steady. The hack had been embedded city-wide for over a year. A sleeper. It listened, using the diagnostic functions of every NewYou booth on the grid, searching for a specific set of biometric and neurological markers. A candidate who could survive the process.
“Jane Miller,” Marcus said, the name heavy in the close air. “It found her at Crestview Plaza. Used the avatar as a template, just like we thought. But after she was made… it triggered a system-wide instability. A forced rollback. It was supposed to erase itself. A ghost in the machine.”
He scrolled further. The data chilled him. The timestamps jumped forward a week after Jane’s creation. A new subject ID appeared: E-Ortega.
“Oh, no,” he breathed.
The logs detailed a sequence. Initiate Huntress transformation protocol.Monitor synaptic integration. Halt process. Initiate reversal. Reset subject memory to pre-transformation baseline. Repeat. The cycle counter ticked up with a detached, sterile precision: 17, 23, 31, 44. Over forty times. Erin Ortega, the golf coach, had been twisted into Huntress and then unwound, over and over, like a piece of software being debugged. The last entry was time-stamped from that morning. Subject consciousness achieved during phase three. Containment breach. Structural failure of mobile unit.
Marcus looked up at the woman by the door. Her expression was unreadable, but a fine tremor ran through her hands, which she clenched into fists until her knuckles were white.
“You remember any of that?” he asked, his voice gentle.
She shook her head once, a sharp movement. “Fragments.Dreams. A sense of… repetition. Like being stuck in a loop where the walls were always getting closer.” Her Romanian accent was thicker, strained. “He used me to perfect it. To get it right for someone else.”
“Yeah,” Marcus said, shutting the pad down. The light died, leaving them in the gloom. “He found the perfect candidate in Jane, but he needed to fine-tune the process on a… a willing subject first. Someone in the system already. You.”
He stood, his joints stiff. “The hacker didn’t sign his work. But the way this code is structured, the access points it used… it’s insider knowledge.Senior-level. I have enough parameters here—protocol preferences, time windows, favorite backdoors—to run a query. If I can cross-reference it against the NewYou corporate personnel database, I could find him. Pinpoint who had the skill and the access.”
Erin turned from the door, a faint hope in her eyes. “Then we go to Serena. She is the director. She can get this access. It will be simple.”
Marcus let out a short, dry laugh. It scraped in his throat. “Simple. No.”
“Why not?”
“Because we don’t need a user directory, Erin. We need the Black Book. The corporate HR database isn’t for pay slips and vacation days. It’s the vault. It holds everything NewYou has ever collected on its employees. Psychological profiles, financial triggers, medical history, private correspondence they shouldn’t have. Dirt on competitors. It’s the most valuable asset they own, and the most dangerous. It’s not stored here. It’s on a fortified server farm, probably under a mountain somewhere, with quantum encryption and enough security to make a military base look casual.”
He rubbed his eyes, gritty with fatigue. “Serena runs the local branch. She’s powerful, but she doesn’t have the keys to that vault. Not on her own. Getting a query run on that database? That would require a formal request to corporate, with triplicate justifications and a review board. It would light up a dozen screens. The very people we’re trying to find would see us coming.”
Erin was silent for a long moment. The rain played a steady rhythm on the van. “So we are stuck.”
“Not stuck,” Marcus corrected. He slid the data pad into his inner jacket pocket, feeling its weight against his chest. “We just need a different kind of help. We need Serena to do something risky. We need her to use her influence, call in favors, maybe even… bypass protocols. She can get us in, but she’ll have to stick her neck so far out she might lose her head. And Serena Hayes does not do anything that risks her head. Not for anyone.”
He stepped out of the van into the drizzle. The Canal Street crash site was a pit of shadows and chrome teeth. “We have to convince her it’s the only way to save her empire. That this ghost in her machine is about to bring the whole system down. And we have to do it before the hacker realizes we’ve found his test logs and decides to clean up his other loose end.”
He looked back at Erin, still framed in the wreckage. “Namely, us.”
She stepped down into the mud, her movements soundless. The rain darkened her hair to the color of oil. “Then we should not keep her waiting,” she said, and started walking toward the distant city lights, not checking to see if he followed.