Something’s wrong.
It starts as a hitch in the relay buffer—a tiny echo in outbound packet traffic. I almost miss it. It’s buried under threelayers of routine signal noise, masked by commercial encryption churn. But it flickers twice, out of rhythm.
That’s what gets me.
Rhythm.
Data has cadence if you stare at it long enough. This one skips a beat.
I straighten in the chair and isolate the timestamp. The packet doesn’t originate from our ship. It brushes our network—just a graze—then vanishes into the underlayer traffic routing through Syfer’s criminal lattice.
I could ignore it.
I don’t.
“Don’t,” Vrok says quietly from behind me.
I don’t turn. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t get that look.”
“What look?”
“The one where you start dismantling infrastructure for fun.”
I smile faintly and roll my shoulders back. “I’m not dismantling anything. I’m just curious.”
“That’s worse.”
I begin pulling the relay path manually. The signal has already fractured itself—bounced through dead satellites, through private courier relays, through black-market mesh networks that were never supposed to be traceable.
Whoever built this didn’t want it found.
Or.
They wanted it found by someone who could.
That’s the part that makes my spine tighten.
“You feel that?” I murmur.
Vrok steps closer, boots silent on the deck. “Feel what?”
“Like someone left the door cracked.”
He leans over my shoulder now, close enough that I feel the warmth of him against my back. The bond hums faintly—not alarmed. Alert.
I crack the encryption layer.
It resists.
Then gives.
The first file opens into a fragment of transmission logs—grainy surveillance footage stitched together with timestamp overlays and commentary threads.
The headline scrawled across the header makes my jaw tighten.
CONFIRMED: BUTCHER SIGHTED IN THE RIM.
