He snorts weakly. “That’s not how onions work.”
“It is if you’re mad enough,” I shoot back.
Lonari’s voice rumbles from behind me. “She’s mad enough.”
I flick him a look over my shoulder. “Don’t encourage me.”
“Too late,” he says, and I hear the faintest smile in his tone. It’s not warm, exactly. It’s the kind of smile you get right before you do something illegal in a morally satisfying way.
I plug the packet into a quarantined sandbox—Kaijen hardware, isolated, no external uplinks. It runs on a closed loop and breathes through a one-way valve: it can read, it can’t speak. If the packet tries to phone home, it’ll scream into a void.
At least in theory.
I start the first pass.
The screen floods with code—dense, elegant encryption layers stacked like armor plates. Whoever built this wasn’t a street hacker. This is professional. Military-adjacent.
Clint leans forward. “That’s Alliance cipher structuring.”
My stomach tightens. “You recognize it?”
He nods slowly. “Yeah. Not the exact key, obviously. But the formatting. The internal segmentation. It’s… standardized.”
“Standardized for what?” I ask.
Clint’s jaw flexes. “For things that aren’t supposed to exist on civilian networks.”
Lonari’s voice is low. “So it’s real.”
Clint doesn’t look away from the screen. “It’s real.”
I exhale through my nose, fingers flying. I don’t brute-force it—too loud, too messy. I go around. I exploit the tiny human flaw in every system: someone had to make it usable.
I find a maintenance tag. I find a checksum that assumes nobody would ever see it. I find a tiny sloppy corner where arrogance got lazy.
And then?—
The outer layer fractures.
Data spills into readable structure like blood into water.
My heart slams against my ribs.
“Jordan?” Clint’s voice is tight.
“I’m in,” I whisper.
Lonari steps closer. I feel his breath shift behind me, the subtle way he goes still when something matters.
The first files are routing logs—timestamped directives, delivery confirmations, procurement reference numbers.
Procurement.
My mouth goes dry.
“Oh,” I say, and it comes out half laugh, half horror. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”
“What?” Clint demands.
