She doesn’t want a shootout on a casino floor with market panic already lit.
She wants leverage.
So she tries another angle.
“This is for your protection,” she says, voice softer.
My stomach flips with old fury. “Don’t.”
The word comes out like a blade.
Her eyes narrow. “What.”
“Don’t say that,” I snap, heat rising in my throat. “IHC used to say that right before they locked doors. Right before they filed kids away. Protection is what you call control when you’re ashamed of it.”
Silence slams down.
Even the casino music seems quieter for a second.
The patrol leader’s expression shifts—something like discomfort, quickly buried.
She clears her throat. “We will return with formal documentation.”
I tilt my head. “Do that.”
She looks at Lonari. “This isn’t over.”
Lonari smiles, all teeth. “Nothing ever is.”
The patrol turns and leaves in disciplined silence, boots clicking on polished floor.
Only when the doors hiss shut behind them do I realize my hands are shaking.
Lonari glances at my hands. His jaw tightens.
“Server spine,” I mutter quickly, because if I stay in the lobby, I’ll start spiraling.
Lonari nods. “Go.”
Back in the server spine, I slam the door shut harder than necessary and lean against it for a second, breathing through the sting in my side.
The cold air bites my skin. The fans roar. The blinking lights look indifferent.
Good.
Indifference is soothing.
I push back to the terminal and pull up my Yatori archive subset—the chunk I kept offline, the stuff I haven’t fully sifted because I’ve been busy not dying.
I start digging.
Not the obvious logs. Not the biometrics I already flagged. Not the docking overwrites.
I look for structural inconsistencies—the kind that happen when someone higher touches a system.
And there it is.
A fragment buried in an authorization package: a partial key string, truncated, shoved into a header field like an afterthought.
