Location: Control Core
Time: Same
“I’m in.”
The words come easy.
Because getting here—
That was the hard part.
The control core is exactly what I expected.
Minimalist.
Centralized.
Every system routed through a single, elegant architecture.
Kade didn’t build redundancy.
He built perfection.
Which means he built vulnerability.
My fingers move across the interface, slipping past security layers that think they’re invisible.
They’re not.
Not to me.
“I’m inside his primary control lattice,” I say. “No resistance yet.”
Of course not.
He doesn’t think anyone can reach this far.
That’s about to change.
I start cutting power.
Not randomly.
Not aggressively.
Surgically.
A flicker here.
A delay there.
Subsystems dropping just enough to look like strain.
Not sabotage.
Failure.
The kind of failure that makes a man like Kade trust his own system—
