Page 93 of Cold Ignition

Keanu huffed a quiet breath, something almost like a laugh slipping through it.

“Cold ignition,” he said.

Rangi’s brow lifted slightly. “That what we’re calling it?”

Keanu nodded once, looking between them—really looking this time.

“No build. No warning,” he said. “Just the moment everything aligned—pressure, heat, and choice—until it caught...”

Alexios’s voice came in, low and certain, finishing it without hesitation. “...and became something none of us can walk away from.”

Rangi’s hand tightened briefly where it rested against Keanu, grounding, claiming.

“Good,” he said.

Keanu met his gaze, then Alexios’s.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Good.”

Alexios inclined his head once. “Then we don’t.”

Rangi’s mouth curved, slow and dangerous. “Not going anywhere.”

Keanu exhaled, the weight of it settling into something solid beneath his ribs.

“Yeah,” he said. “Not going anywhere.”

Chapter Sixteen

The control room was never truly dark.

Even at this hour—when most of the compound had powered down into something resembling rest—the space still breathed with quiet light. Screens glowed in layered arrays, soft blues and shifting data streams reflecting off glass and metal, casting Luca in fractured illumination where he stood at the center of it all.

Alone.

Exactly where he preferred to be when it mattered.

His fingers moved across the interface with fluid precision, pulling threads of code apart and rebuilding them in real time. Lines shifted, recompiled, evolved—an architecture taking shape piece by piece, elegant in its design, devastating in its potential.

Not defensive.

Not reactive.

This was something else.

Something deliberate.

He leaned back slightly, eyes scanning the latest iteration as it stabilized across three separate systems. Routing overlays synced. Signal masking re-calibrated. Predictive response nodes aligned.

A network within a network.

Invisible—until it wasn’t.

Luca exhaled slowly, gaze narrowing as he introduced the final variable.

A subtle bleed in the system—just enough to be seen by the right eyes. Just enough to look like opportunity. He knew exactly how it would read on the other side.

A vulnerability.