We’re halfway through the access crawl when it hits—a deep, blaring siren echoing through the vent shafts above our heads. Not an alert. Not a general lockdown. Something else.
Fire.
We both freeze.
“That’s three decks up,” he says, voice low.
I swipe to my pad, call up the overlay. “Containment unit in Sector Six just pinged with an active ignition flag. Heat spike. Might be accidental, might be cover.”
“Either way, patrols will divert.”
He turns to me, jaw tight. “We split.”
“No.”
“It’s temporary. I’ll loop back. You hit the data cluster, plant the false trail. I’ll keep their eyes on me.”
I hate it.
Every muscle in my body rebels at the thought of being apart from him, even for a second. Not because I don’t trust him to come back—but because I trust himtoo muchto let me go if things go sideways.
But he’s right.
I’ve worked these systems. The data cluster's firewalls are ten levels deep and slippery. If I’m going to inject a false path into Obol’s trace algorithm, I need every second the diversion can buy us. I won’t get a second shot.
“Two minutes,” I whisper.
His nod is solemn. “Less if I can help it.”
And just like that, he slips into the shadows of a cross-tunnel and vanishes like smoke.
My chest contracts the second he’s gone.
I run.
The cluster is located on the mezzanine above the reactor shell, tucked behind a disused gravity modulator that's beenhumming wrong for years. Most engineers avoid it. That works in my favor.
I vault a guard rail, land on a grated platform that vibrates under my weight. The room smells like ionized metal and dying power—burnt circuits and cold air.
I reach the terminal.
Fingers fly.
The code fights me.
Of course it does. Obol doesn't make this easy. Each level I pass throws back echoes of my own identity logs, timestamps of interactions they’ve already flagged. I dig deep, rerouting command strings through a dead handler profile I buried in the system months ago.
Ninety seconds.
Come on, come on.
The fake path begins compiling—my biometric trail, altered. Shifted. It’ll show me bypassing containment, rerouting through a maintenance scaffold in a completely different wing.
It’ll buy us time.
Maybe enough.
I’m halfway through the overwrite when the sound hits me.
