The connection was dead. The black terminal screen offered nothing but the reflection of Iralis's terrified, bloodless face.
She sat frozen in the guest chair, her fingers hovering millimeters above the keyboard like it was a live explosive.
The ambient heat radiating from the overworked processors inside the silver laptop felt suffocating against her chest.
She had just fired a digital flare directly into the crosshairs of an international ghost syndicate, and they had fired back.
"They have our IP," Iralis choked out, the words catching in her throat. The clinical, detached systems architect was gone, replaced by a woman staring down the barrel of a loaded gun. "Ryan, they didn't just trace the proxy tunnel. They bypassed it entirely. They established a direct, two-way handshake with my local machine. If they deploy a sleeper worm, they can format the entire forty-second floor. They can wipe Rebuild Tech off the servers."
