Page 188 of Mine Again
Luca
The alarm splits the air, and I’m on my feet before I’m fully aware of moving. Silencing it with one hand, I grab my phone with the other.
Code streams across the screen in a rapid cascade, rows of numbers and encrypted tags I read in a blink, my mind already sorting and parsing before I even accept the incoming call.
“Talk,” I say, my voice running through the distorter.
“Boss.” The reply is flattened, scrambled until it’s nothing but static and shape. Marlow. He’s been in my orbit for years, feeding me intel and filtering job requests to match my specs. “You’re going to want the news on. Every channel.”
I hit the remote with my free hand. The screens above my desk flare to life, all carrying the same breaking headline.
DELAWARE BLACKOUT – HOSPITALS IMPACTED, LIVES LOST
Isa steps in beside me, close enough that I catch the faint scent of her hair. Her eyes lock on the footage of chaos in hospital corridors, franticnurses, and a dark storage facility. Without a word, her hand finds mine, fingers curling tight in silent support of whatever is coming next.
The anchor’s voice is urgent, words clipped to keep pace with the crawl of grim updates scrolling along the bottom of the screen.
“The catastrophic cyberattack on a Delaware cold storage logistics hub has left hospitals across the Mid-Atlantic scrambling. The facility, a critical distribution point for insulin, oncology medication, and donor organs, shut down abruptly this morning. Backup systems failed to activate, and despite the best efforts of authorities, it remains offline. Officials confirm that thousands of vials of life-saving medication have spoiled and at least one organ transport was missed, resulting in the death of a high-profile transplant patient in Pennsylvania.
“A decrypted message sent to a federal cybersecurity channel reads: Consider this a trial run. Systems will be restored at three p.m. EST. Transfer two billion dollars annually to the listed crypto wallets, and your systems stay clean. Miss a payment… and you’ll wish you had another Delaware.
“The message is signed simply, The Venom. Officials say the true identity of The Venom remains unknown, but in the digital world, the name has earned a fearsome reputation in recent years.”
Beside me, Isa gasps, her hand flying to her mouth. The sound slices into me. I kill the audio feed, my jaw locking hard enough that my teeth ache.
Her wide eyes find mine.
“That wasn’t you, was it?”
I shake my head once. I squeeze her hand before letting go. The heat in my chest is beyond anger. It’s raw, corrosive, with a taste like blood in my mouth.
“Fucking Jackal.”
My fists clench until my knuckles burn. I draw a deep breath.
My muscles loosen only where they need to; the rest stay coiled,ready. The rage settles deep, banked like an ember waiting for the right spark. The noise in my head falls away, leaving only the clean hum of calculation.
My mind clears as I drop into my chair, the leather creaking under the force. I grab my earpiece and snap it into place, then my fingers hit the keys, hammering out commands, eyes scanning lines of code as the screens split into cascading windows.
The bastard’s fingerprints are everywhere. Buried deep. Waiting to blow.
Dead servers. Shaved timestamps. My signature methods, copied line for line. My exact chaining pattern. The same recursive cleanup script I’ve never seen replicated. Until now. Precision exploits I built from nothing, now turned on me.
Every fragment lands like a spike to my skull.
The soft whir of wheels cuts through the static in my head. Isa rolls a chair up beside me. She doesn’t say a word, just sits close enough that I feel the faint press of her knee against mine.
That quiet presence steadies the turmoil inside me in ways I’ll never admit out loud. It’s a reminder, one I need, that there’s more at stake than my name or my pride.
Marlow’s voice crackles in my ear, flattened by the distorter.
“Feds are already crawling all over it. The code matches your style.”
My fingers fly faster, bypassing firewalls like they’re paper.
“I can see that.” The words are venom, my lip curling.
“The Jackal?” Marlow asks.
