Mira's loft had become a cave. Seventy-two hours. A blur of neural interfaces and code fragments. Takeout containers formed a miniature skyline across her workbench. Synth-caf cups stacked like tiny tombs. Her six screens provided the only illumination, bathing her face in sickly blue glow. The light deepened the dark circles under her eyes into bruises.

  She hadn't showered. Hadn't properly slept. Circuit grease blackened her fingerprints. Her eyes burned with the digital fatigue of seventy-two hours staring at code. Outside her blacked-out windows, bass tremors from passing transport drones vibrated through the walls, the city's mechanical pulse continuing while she chased ghosts through the net.

  "Come on," she whispered, fingers dancing across the haptic interface. "Show me your secrets."

  The stolen drone data sat in her system like a puzzle box with teeth. Halcyon's encryption was paranoia made code. Multi-layered. Self-rewriting. Trap corridors designed to waste a hacker into oblivion. Three days of grinding had yielded nothing but bloodshot eyes and certainty: whatever they were hiding was worth finding.

  Her vision blurred, pixelating the code in front of her. She blinked hard, knuckles digging into eye sockets, then fumbled for the last cold dregs of synth-caf. The bitter liquid slid down her throat without registering.

  "Zero-day thinking," she muttered, shoving away from her desk. Sometimes the solution lurked in the negative space, the code's blind spots. Uncle Janek's voice surfaced: Look for the patterns they don't know they're leaving.

  Mira paced her small apartment, mind racing. Halcyon's patterns. Their signatures. The way they structured their data paths.

  She stopped suddenly, a half-formed thought crystallizing.

  "Not a wall." Her voice cracked in the empty room. "A mirror."

  She dropped back into her chair, fingers flying across the interface. Instead of attacking the encryption head-on, she built a reflection of it, a protocol that mimicked the encryption's recognition patterns. The system, thinking it was communicating with itself, opened pathways that would stay sealed against brute-force attacks. The technique was unorthodox, something Janek had shown her years ago.

  "Encryption's not just a lock," Janek's voice echoed in her memory. "It's a doorman checking IDs."

  For agonizing minutes, nothing happened. Her pulse hammered in her temples, each heartbeat a countdown. Then a flicker. Progress bars flooding with toxic green light. The feedback loop hummed through her fingertips as the encryption recognized its own digital DNA and unfolded like origami in reverse.

  "Got you," she whispered, a grim smile cutting across her exhausted face.

  The decrypted files cascaded across her screens. Internal memos. Shipping manifests. Personnel files. One stood apart: a video fragment with a timestamp from three days ago. She tapped it open. Adrenaline spiked through her system.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  The footage was from inside what could only be the BioNex facility. Clinical white walls. Medical equipment. A row of modified braindance tanks. A subject lay strapped to a reclined chair, neural probes attached to their temples. Their face was obscured, but their body language spoke of fear. Rigid muscles. Straining against restraints.

  "Project Lazarus trial 37-B," said a clinical voice off-camera. "Subject exhibits optimal neural plasticity for threshold pattern induction."

  The subject convulsed as current flowed through the neural interface. Data readouts in the corner of the screen spiked in patterns that matched Anya's description of Project Lazarus, death-state neural patterns being manipulated into something else entirely.

  "Transition state achieved," the voice continued, dispassionate. "Cognitive backdoor established. Beginning compliance protocol."

  The subject's struggles weakened, body going slack. Something dark and wet trickled from their nose.

  "Threshold pattern stable. Preparing memory imprint sequence."

  Mira lurched forward, bile rising in her throat. Her fingers froze over the interface. Thousands of XBD files had crossed her desk, but this wasn't entertainment. This was violation.

  As she moved to secure the file, her commlink flickered. The display jittered, pixels scrambling like insects. For three terrifying seconds, her entire system seemed to freeze.

  Then, in the corner of her vision, a text alert materialized:

  //TRACKING_ALERT: HALCYON_META//

  It vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Her system returned to normal, screens steady, as if nothing had happened.

  Mira's hand hovered over her interface, suddenly afraid to touch it. Her heartbeat thundered in her ears. She ran diagnostics, three separate scans that showed nothing unusual. No trace of the alert. No evidence of intrusion.

  That was impossible. System glitches didn't target specific entities. They didn't name names.

  META. Metacognitive analysis. Halcyon's rumored system for tracking not just what data was accessed, but how it was processed. They weren't just monitoring her searches. They were analyzing her investigative patterns. Predicting her next moves.

  The realization hit her like ice water: they weren't just watching her investigation. They were nesting inside her systems. The drone was no coincidence. Halcyon had tagged her, tracked her, and penetrated security she'd spent years perfecting. Without leaving a single digital fingerprint.

  "Drek. Drek. Drek." Her hands moved with practiced efficiency despite the fear coursing through her veins. She couldn't stay here. Couldn't trust her own equipment.

  She grabbed three secure data shards from her desk drawer, making redundant copies of the BioNex footage and related files. One went into her jacket pocket. Another into a hidden compartment in her boot. The third she slotted into a hollow space behind a loose wall panel. Insurance if she didn't make it out.

  As she worked, her mind calculated options. Silas's safehouse would mean exposing a cop to corporate blowback. The Analog was too public. That left Janek's old protocols. Digital breadcrumbs designed to lead pursuers in circles while she disappeared into the city's blind spots.

  Mira grabbed her go-bag from under the bed, medkit, portable power cell, burner commlinks, credstick with emergency funds. No time to pack anything else. Whatever had flagged her system could be tracking her physical location already.

  The evidence was too important to lose. People were being neurally reprogrammed in those tanks. Minds rewritten against their will. And Halcyon Array was behind it all.

  She slung the bag over her shoulder, fingers ghosting above the light switch. Across her darkened apartment, screens pulsed like digital sentinels. Witnesses to her discovery. And to what had discovered her.