“Not even himself,” Kenron mutters.
He’s not wrong.
The third encryption layer unfurls before me, a black field of shifting code—an intellectual snarl designed to break lesser minds. I swipe a bloody finger against the shard I plugged in earlier. Its energy flares.
“Come on…” I whisper, breath fogging on the cold glass.
The fail-safe script is pregnant in the window, waiting, pulsing the same deep crimson as my wound beneath the tunic.
I route it through grid access instead of council mainline, forcing the code to scrape through an unregulated power relay. The screen flickers.
Accessing grid [Overcurrent]. Relays: 2. Confirm?
“Yes,” I hiss, jamming the enter command with the heel of my palm.
The whole console groans. Something behind the walls pops like a gut-shot capacitor.
The alarms above pitch higher.
“They know,” Kenron says. “They’re moving.”
“Stall them another minute,” I whisper. “I’m almost ready to kill it.”
He curses softly. I hear him adjust his stance. The door shudders.
I dump a final string of code like a bucket of gasoline, praying it burns. The kill command flickers at the top of the interface:
NANITE RELEASE PROTOCOL – ARMED
KILL SCRIPT AVAILABLE – WAITING EXECUTE
No time to savor it.
My vision swims for a moment when I blink, and I realize I haven’t breathed in nearly thirty seconds.
Sweat runs down my cheek, stinging the raw cut on my neck. My fingers tremble. I move them anyway.
I anchor the script to a forced derezzing node on the dispersal grid. If it works, the nanite logic collapses on itself. If it doesn’t, the system may just ignore the attempt and fire right past me.
The console chirps like it’s mocking me.
REDUNDANT VERIFICATION REQUIRED
ENTER BIOMETRIC TOKEN: DENNIS L. MONTANA
Of course.
I reach for the override pendant hanging inside my tunic. My chest feels like it’s closing in on itself. I press it to the input pad.
It scans. It scans.
ACCESS GRANTED.
His voice.
Slithering out of the speakers, slick and cold as dead water.
“You always were sentimental, Kristi.”
