Page 95 of Cold Ignition

Colder.

“And I’ll take them apart while they try.”

He leaned forward again, hands returning to the controls as the system expanded, adapting, evolving in response to the intrusion.

This wasn’t the end. It wasn’t even the beginning.

It was the ignition point.

And this time—it wouldn’t be controlled.

It would burn all the way through.

****

Troy Walker didn’t work in the light.

He never had.

Even inside Directorate infrastructure—layers of glass, steel, and systems built to look like control—he preferred the edges. The blind spots. The places where observation didn’t announce itself and conclusions could form without interference.

The room he occupied now wasn’t officially his. It didn’t need to be.

Three screens. One secured terminal. A private relay that never touched the main grid unless he allowed it.

That was enough.

On the central display, Luca’s architecture unfolded in clean, elegant layers—code translating into structure, structure into intent.

Troy leaned back slightly in his chair, one hand resting against his jaw as he watched the system breathe.

Invited attention in ways most people would miss entirely.

A faint exhale left him as another probe sequence lit across the lower corner of the screen—Directorate signatures, masked but not enough. Not for someone who had spent years cataloging the organization’s habits, its tells, its arrogance.

“They won’t see it,” Troy murmured.

Not the way he did. To them, this would look like opportunity. A vulnerability. Something to exploit.

To him—it was a flare. A deliberate one. Luca wasn’t slipping. He was baiting.

Troy’s gaze tracked the flow of incoming signals, the way they tested edges, pressed into the system, probed for weakness. And the way the system... let them.

Just enough. A slow, humorless smile touched his mouth.

“Jesus, kid,” he muttered. “You’re practically daring them.”

He’d been watching Luca for years. Not officially. Not in any way that would show up on a report. Because Luca wasn’t supposed to matter individually.

Black Tide was the asset. The threat. The variable.

But Troy had seen the patterns. The fingerprints. The precision behind the chaos. He’d traced operations back to code no one else had recognized, systems that protected more than they destroyed, quiet interventions that never made it into Directorate records because they didn’t fit the narrative.

Hospitals rerouted from cyber attacks.

Community networks stabilized after infrastructure hits.

People—anonymous, invisible—kept safe because someone had decided they should be.