I set the cable down. “Becket.”
“What?” he muttered.
“Are you doing this on purpose? You see she can’t stop staring at your screen.” I didn’t like that my brother was baiting Harmony.
He kept typing for another few seconds, then sighed, “Sorry.”
Harmony blinked. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” he said, leaning back in his chair, he looked at Harmony not me, “if someone is using your old relay, my contact and I need your brain to understand how they’re moving through it. And it also means if I tell you that, Eric will snap me in half.”
Harmony looked between us. “I don’t want to cause trouble between you guys, but your brother is right, Eric.”
I didn’t like those words but I knew they were right. We needed answers and Harmony was a missing link.
Her jaw tensed.
“Harmony, you’re smart. Faster than most. You built those back doors when you were a kid. Whoever’s using them knows your patterns. My friend can trace their steps, but you know the origin,” Becket explained.
Her breathing hitched. She looked at me, almost like she was asking permission. She had walked away from that life and tried her best to stay away, and yet somehow it was following her whether she liked it or not.
I shook my head instantly. “We said we’d keep you out of this.”
Her eyes softened, not with agreement but with resolve. “Eric… someone is using something I created.”
“You were a kid,” I reminded her.
“And now someone is twisting what I did,” she whispered.
Becket sat forward, elbows on his knees. “Look, neither of us wants Harmony diving into a live relay. But wedoneed her insight. Just the structure. Architecture. Nothing active.”
Harmony nodded slowly but I saw it. The shift. The slipping of fear into focus. The sharpening of something inside her I hadn’t seen since the night she told me how she built the encrypted channel that helped put her father away.
She wasn’t spiraling. She was preparing to do what needed to be done. She wasn’t the type of woman to back away from a challenge, life had taught her to face her battles head-on, and it scared the hell out of me.
I exhaled through my nose. “Fine. But I stay with you the entire time.”
“You’re not hovering behind her breathing like a bear,” Becket muttered.
“Try and stop me.”
Harmony gave a small laugh and the sound loosened something painful in my chest. Becket rotated the laptop slightly so she could see better. “These are the relays that were activated when the message came through two nights ago. No new traffic yet. But the silence is… calculated.”
Harmony murmured, “They’re testing. Waiting for movement.”
Becket nodded. “Exactly.”
She leaned in, eyes scanning the pattern diagram. She shook her head. “This fork isn’t mine.”
“That’s what I thought,” Becket said. “New code. Not yours.”
“But….” Her brow furrowed. “This one is.” She pointed at a branching node. “That’s an old fail-safe. I added it so the system wouldn’t lock if I bailed mid-route.”
Becket snapped upright. “You didn’t tell me there were fail-safes.”
“I didn’t remember until now,” she whispered. “I haven’t seen this system in years.”
Becket rubbed both hands over his face. “Damn. Okay. That changes things.”
