The terminal's light cast Camilla Varn's face in sterile blue as she watched the trace logs cycle backward.
Frame by frame.
Tessa Lyne, looping in reverse.
Archive Terminal 12B. Exit corridor. Backtrace ping. Power node skip. Route divergence at sublevel junction 04-B.
Each motion rendered into a string of time-coded vulnerability. A trail of mistakes, intent, and—most dangerous of all—curiosity.
Camilla sat perfectly still, eyes flicking across the screen with mechanical precision. She didn't blink often. When she did, it was like a process rebooting.
The program she was using wasn't on any official Zodiac registry. It was buried behind five layers of falsified code, written by her own hand nearly eleven years ago—when this had all been theory. When ghosts were just assets without names.
She toggled a subroutine.
Four containment routes compiled automatically.
INTERCEPTISOLATENEUTRALIZEERASE
All viable.
All clean.
All insufficient.
She deleted them.
One by one.
