Echoes of RetaliationThe city hummed with quiet tension. In the distance, the early morning sun bled through heavy clouds, brushing the skyline in muted gold. Inside Sterling Tower, the mood was different—sharper, more cautious. Every corner whispered of vigilance, every sound measured, controlled.Ethan stood by the window of his office, arms crossed, a faint reflection of his own figure cast against the glass. Below, the streets stretched endlessly, a stream of cars weaving through the veins of the city. It should have been peaceful, but his gut told him peace was just the breath before chaos.Behind him, Clara moved quietly, her heels making soft clicks on the marble floor. She had come to drop off a report, but lingered, sensing the tension radiating off him. “You’ve been standing there for nearly an hour,” she said gently.He didn’t look at her. “I’m waiting.”“For what?”“For him to make his move.”Clara’s voice softened. “You think he will?”Ethan turned, finally facing her.

Fractures and FirewallsBy morning, the illusion was already working.Sterling Enterprises hummed like a machine trying too hard to appear fine. Meetings were held. Memos were sent. But underneath the polished surface, people whispered. They whispered about the breach. About loyalty. About Clara.Clara felt it in every look, every hushed conversation that stopped the moment she entered the room. She had expected it, Ethan had warned her, but knowing didn’t make it easier.Still, she played her part. She kept her expression cool, her voice steady, her actions precise. Everything Kane would expect from someone pretending not to crumble.The first test came before noon.“Clara?” Samuel’s voice carried across the corridor. He caught up with her near the server elevators, holding a folder. “Ethan wants you in the conference room. Now.”Her heart skipped, but she kept her tone even. “What’s this about?”Samuel’s expression was unreadable. “You’ll see.”When she walked in, half the senior t

The Breach WithinThe night after the attack was one of quiet chaos. The city outside Sterling Enterprise pulsed with its usual rhythm — horns, chatter, the distant hum of generators — but inside, the building was a fortress under lockdown. Security cameras flickered, red alarms had long stopped blaring, but the tension in the air remained.Ethan stood before the massive wall of monitors in the company’s control room. The bluish light cast shadows across his face, highlighting the dark circles under his eyes. His suit jacket was gone, sleeves rolled to his elbows. His mind ran faster than the servers before him.Clara entered quietly, her steps light but firm. A faint bruise lined her forearm — a reminder of the chaos earlier that day when the attack came through the server vault. She had helped subdue one of the intruders before security got to him.“I’ve been reviewing the logs,” she said, her voice steady though her body screamed exhaustion. “The attack came from two fronts — phys

The Reversal ProtocolThe storm had passed, but the silence it left behind was worse.The safehouse felt smaller now, the hum of the servers replaced by an uneasy stillness. Outside, the city slept under a veil of damp haze, its neon glow muted by the fog. Inside, Ethan and Clara sat in the half-dark, the glow of a single desk lamp slicing through the shadows.Clara’s breathing had steadied. She was sitting on the edge of the table, wrapped in one of Ethan’s jackets, the fabric too big but warm enough to stop her trembling. Across from her, Ethan was running diagnostics on what was left of their network.Every screen told the same story: corruption. Every system they had touched during the counterattack was bleeding data.Ethan exhaled slowly. “He reversed it.”Clara looked up. “What?”“The mirror protocol—we thought it was reflecting his data. But he embedded a failsafe. When the feedback loop triggered, he rode it back through our own system. The ‘Echo Returned’ message wasn’t a thr

The Phantom memoryFor the first time in weeks, Kane’s network wasn’t watching them — they were watching him.But beneath that small victory was a current neither of them could name. The code running on the terminal wasn’t behaving the way it should. The script Ethan had written to isolate Kane’s surveillance fragments was looping back, reading and rewriting data faster than he could trace it.“Something’s wrong,” Clara said softly, eyes locked on the monitor.Ethan leaned closer. “It’s cycling through unauthorized memory sectors—someone embedded an adaptive mirror into the network.”She frowned. “A mirror?”He typed rapidly, his brows furrowed. “It’s pulling from you.”Clara’s chest tightened. “From me?”“The neural calibration you used to sync with the firewall earlier… the system’s reading it as a data source.”Static flickered across the monitors, and thenthe screens froze.A faint whisper filled the air. It wasn’t digital. It was human. “You shouldn’t have come back.”Clara’s b