I know the exact minute because my implant doesn’t ping the way it usually does when Oversight shifts posture.
It bites.
Not pain, exactly. Not even sensation in the conventional sense. It’s a deep, predatory pressure that blooms along my spine and up into the base of my skull, like invisible teeth sinking into vertebrae that were never meant to be handled this way.
I freeze mid-step in the safehouse corridor, one hand braced against the wall, my breath leaving my body in a slow, involuntary exhale.
“Oh,” I whisper.
The air feels thicker.
Heavier.
Like gravity just got recalibrated by something with a bureaucratic mandate and a god complex.
Behind my eyes, layers of my implant architecture light up that haven’t been active since I defected.
Deep-layer telemetry scaffolds.
Oversight handshakes.
Containment heuristics.
They’re not asking anymore.
They’re asserting.
My jaw locks so hard my teeth grind.
“No,” I mutter. “No no no.”
I pivot and move fast, boots silent on concrete, pulse climbing hard and ugly as I drop into the ops room and slam into the chair in front of my cracked terminal.
My hands are already moving.
I don’t consciously tell them to.
They just… do.
I jack directly into the implant’s diagnostic port and start ripping through outbound telemetry threads, tracing the signature backward through ghost servers and dead routing nodes I planted years ago specifically to mask this exact kind of escalation.
They burned through all of them.
Cleanly.
Professionally.
Like they always knew where they were.
“Son of a bitch,” I breathe.
I dig deeper.
Past current routing.
Past modern Alliance infrastructure.
Past the sanitized shell of my civilian placement file.
