I exhale and smile at the door like it can feel embarrassed. “Okay. We’re doing it the hard way.”
I pop the wall plate, expose the cable bundle, find the actuator loop, and bridge it with a quick splice. A tiny spark bites my fingertip—sharp, bright pain—and the door clicks open with reluctant compliance.
Inside, the server spine breathes cold air in steady sighs. Fans roar softly. Blue indicator lights blink in patterns that feel almost smug. The room smells like ozone, dust that’s been heated a thousand times, and the faint plasticky sweetness of insulation warming under constant load.
Cameras, of course. Three obvious, probably more hidden.
I look directly into the nearest one and lift my compad like I’m giving it a polite toast. “Hi. You’re going to take a nap.”
A loop packet slides into the camera node. The feed freezes on an empty hallway view and holds.
Now: surgery.
Step one is separating the casino entertainment network from security. Whoever designed the Nun tied them together because convenience is the god of criminals, and gods love sacrifices—usually in the form of basic operational security. Entertainment is loud and fat and perfect for hiding sniffers. Security should be sharp and lean and isolated. I boot theholo-dancers and slot-song subnets off the main trunk and shove them into a secondary lane. Alerts flare, then settle as the system rebalances; somewhere above, a gambler probably curses because the ambient music stuttered mid-chorus.
I don’t care.
Step two: reroute what I need through a maintenance tunnel relay—something boring enough nobody’s watching it. I find an old node taggedCOOLANT FLOW DIAGNOSTICS, still active but barely, like a forgotten organ twitching out of habit. Perfect. I thread my comm suite through it, narrow the path into a tight encrypted pipe, and set the noise floor to “so dull it makes auditors yawn.”
Step three: remove the “convenient” listening devices.
Because they’re here. I canfeelthem the way you can feel a cheap lock on a door.
I pop a panel behind the main router rack.
There it is: a little black puck, unlabeled, nestled behind cable bundles like a tick in fur.
“Cute,” I whisper, and unplug it.
I find another behind a power bus.
Then a third—wired in cocky, like whoever planted it assumed nobody would dare touch it.
I yank it free anyway. Another spark bites my finger. My skin smells faintly singed.
“Stop listening,” I mutter. “It’s rude.”
In under ten minutes I’ve got a small pile of pucks on the floor like dead insects.
I wipe my palms on my pants, inhale cold air that tastes like metal, and let myself feel one tiny flicker of satisfaction.
Safe pocket. Mostly clean.
Now: Clint.
My throat tightens on his name for a reason I don’t like admitting out loud. Clint Rogers isn’t “a contact.” He’s one of theonly adults from the IHC ecosystem who ever looked at me like I was a person instead of a file that needed moving from shelf to shelf. I haven’t spoken to him in years, but some connections don’t rust—they just go quiet until you need them to carry weight again.
I initiate the handshake protocol I built back in work-study—an old orphanage-era rotating key set disguised as a routine maintenance ping. It’s antique, ugly, and specific. Nobody fakes it unless they lived it.
The holo displays:
INITIATING: WORK-STUDY ROTATING HANDSHAKE — KEYSET 12B
My pulse trips.
Then:
COUNTERSIGN REQUIRED
