Page 220 of Mine Again
“And I’m glad you did.” He nods to the screens. “Let’s get your girl back.”
We move, chairs scrape, and the grid brightens. His team of specialists takes their stations without chatter, hands already on keyboards, eyes locked, waiting for orders.
Maximo appears in the glass, watches for a minute, and disappears again, like a shadow testing the temperature of the room.
Hours blur. Then a day.
Then two.
Maximo’s hackers pushed on the obvious doors and were swallowed whole. I tried ghosts, false trails, surgical touches.
Every time we found the edge of a seam, it resealed. Hale’s fortressdidn’t just block us. It taunted us. Adaptive, recursive, self-healing. The thing grows back even while you watch it.
At one point, Uberto leans back and rolls his neck.
“If I were Hale, I’d want you to feel this. Not just the wall. The insult.”
“He likes the game,” I say. “He thinks time belongs to him.”
Around us, men trade shifts, passing chairs like runners pass a baton. Coffee goes cold and gets replaced. Someone brings in food. Most of it remains untouched. The screens keep breathing.
I’m used to working alone. The noise of the team grated on me the first day. Now it threads into me like a second pulse.
I can pass a task and know it will be handled or step away for five minutes and Hale’s mansion will still be watched. I don’t have to carry everything by myself.
Uberto’s presence, in particular, changes the room. He sees diagonals quickly and misses nothing.
Still, we fail in a dozen different ways and keep going.
Near midnight on the second day, I rub the bridge of my nose and exhale. My spine burns. My jaw aches from clenching it so much.
This is what Hale wants. Me trying and failing. Fatigued. Wasting my time.
Uberto taps a slow rhythm at his console. “We’re missing something small. He knows you’re a surgeon with code. So he built a wound that leaves no scar.”
He did. Knowing my skills, Hale built a system with no obvious vulnerabilities. But there’s a weakness somewhere. And I will find it.
My gaze sweeps over the monitors, the fan noise louder in my ears than usual. It’s telling me something. But what?
My attention snags on the far-left grid, a column of feeds looping in grayscale, audio bars flattened to an unbroken line. Background channels. Boring.
And boring gets left alone.
I study the loops a fourth time, then a fifth. A small, repeatable artifact lingers there like a cough behind a door. Not a code flaw. Justan ordinary thing mishandled.
“Mute the primary grid,” I say, sitting up straighter.
The room quiets to a low hum. I slide my chair closer, isolating a side camera feed and its sound bed. Not a door. Not a window. The seam is in how this system treats what it assumes doesn’t matter.
I ride the flaw the way you ride the seam of a wave. No drama. No alarms. A quiet pass through a quiet place. The screen hesitates. Then the picture jumps like a heartbeat.
A hallway comes into focus. A crisp feed, every detail clear… a decorative archway, a closed door.
I track right. Another room. Opulent. High ceiling. Heavy curtains. A bed like a throne.
My heart stutters so hard it misses a beat. For a second, the room tilts, every noise dropping out except the rush of blood in my ears.
There she is.
