Page 19 of Scaled Daddy's Secret Heir
Three steps to the terminal. Patch in. Fingers fly—muscle memory and months of paranoia lining up into something smooth. Beautiful, even.
The encryption handshake kicks in. One blink of the screen, then the access layer starts spooling through my bypass.
Kalev talked me through this already. But now that I’m doing it—actually doing it—my brain’s running ahead of the checklist, finding shortcuts, redundancies, burn points.
I’m not freezing.
I’m working.
And it’s kind of addicting.
“Seventy seconds,” Kalev says in my ear. “How’s it look?”
“Like someone designed this thing while drunk.”
“Welcome to Alliance architecture.”
I grin.
The feed splits—three-thread packet. Primary node marked for rotation. I yank the timestamp, reroute the checksum trace, then anchor the map overlay to a dummy ping ID I coded this morning during lunch break.
They’ll think it’s a broken toilet sensor.
“Forty seconds.”
“Almost there. You ever think about how many lives we stake on bad wiring and caffeine?”
“Only every damn day.”
The final fragment pulses green.
I breathe once. Tap the extraction key. The screen goes dark.
Done.
“All clear,” I whisper.
“Beautiful,” Kalev says. “Exit route two. Hold position another ten for good measure.”
I lean back against the panel. Let my eyes close.
Not all the way. Just enough.
The air’s still cold, still electric. But it’s mine now.
My fingers aren’t shaking.
My knees didn’t buckle.
No one died.
For the first time since I was nine years old, I don’t feel lucky.
I feel capable.
The exit’s as smooth as it ever gets.
I slip down the secondary tunnel, keep to the shadows, and don’t look back. There’s a lull in foot traffic. No sweepers. No alarms. No reason for anyone to notice me.
