The cold in Reykjavik had a texture. It was a positive, biting presence, a dry, crystalline thing that sought the gaps in your armor. Nyx felt it press against the matte fabric of her suit, a dull insistence she noted and dismissed. The thermal layer was holding. A tiny readout in the corner of her vision, projected onto her retina by the contact lens she'd inserted in the airport bathroom, confirmed it: -12°C. External. Core temperature: 36.7°C. Optimal.
The data fortress wasn't a fortress. Not in the storybook sense. It was a unremarkable, three-story geometric block of darkened glass and weathered concrete, squatting at the edge of the Fossvogur industrial district. Its anonymity was its first wall. Its second wall was the silence. No hum of servers, no distant beep of security panels. Just the wind whining off the Faxaflói Bay, scouring the streets.
Nyx became a part of the silence.
She observed from a rusted maintenance gantry on a neighboring fish-packing plant. The scent of old salt and ammonia was sharp in the cold air. For twenty-three minutes, she didn't move. She watched the pattern of the lone security patrol—a man in a thick parka, trudging a predictable rectangle every seven minutes. She watched the single, faint glow of what might be a night-light in a second-floor bathroom. She mapped the blind spots between the stark, white arcs of the motion-sensors. Their light painted the fresh snow a brief, electric blue every few seconds.
Predictable, her mind whispered. The word had no tone. It was a data point.
On the twenty-fourth minute, as the guard vanished around the northeastern corner, she moved. She dropped from the gantry, a ten-foot fall absorbed by the muscles in her legs, her landing in a bank of snow a muffled whump. She was across the exposed service road in a low, fluid sprint, her form a smear of shadow against the white.
The third wall was digital. A frequency-hopping proximity mesh. Her earpiece parsed it, found the gaps, and fed her a path—a shifting, invisible labyrinth in the air. She moved through it like following a heartbeat on a monitor, her steps irregular, pausing, shifting. To an observer, she might have looked like a shadow stuttering in the wind.
The service entrance was a steel door, flush with the wall. No visible lock. A sleek, black panel to the side. She didn't reach for tools. She placed her gloved palm flat against the cold metal of the door itself, just above the panel. The conductive threads in her gloves made contact with the microscopic capacitive sensors embedded in the paint—a hidden, secondary system for biometric-enabled maintenance crews. A system Cicada had acquired the keys to.
A soft, sub-audible vibration passed from her glove, through the metal. The door's internal bolt retracted with a sigh of compressed air.
Inside. Darkness, and a different cold. Sterile, still air. The corridor was narrow, lit only by the weak, greenish emergency EXIT signs. Her retinal display superimposed a wireframe schematic of the building, downloaded during her flight. A pulsating dot marked her target: the primary data nexus. Sub-level one.
She found the maintenance stairwell. Her boots, soles textured with a non-marking compound, made no sound on the grated metal steps. Down. The air grew colder, damper.
The nexus door was a different beast. Reinforced. A keycard scanner glowed a soft, ominous red. This required touch. From a thigh pouch, she extracted a device the size and shape of a lipstick case. She pressed it against the scanner's read head. It emitted a series of rapid, magnetic pulses, mimicking the dance of an authorized card's strip. A brute-force ballet. The light blinked from red to yellow, then green.
Click.
The room beyond was a cathedral of silence. Rack upon rack of server blades, their status LEDs a silent constellation of red, green, and amber. The only sound was the faint, almost imperceptible whisper of liquid coolant moving through pipes. The air smelled of ozone and static.
Her target was a non-descriptive black server near the back, labeled only with a long, alphanumeric string. She approached, her breathing slow, even. No anxiety. No thrill. This was procedure. She connected a slender cable from a port on her wrist to a service terminal on the server's face.
Lines of code began to scroll on her retinal display. Firewalls were not walls to her; they were patterns. She found the rhythm, the flaw in the logic, the forgotten backdoor left by an arrogant engineer. She inserted Cicada's key. The digital lock yielded.
A progress bar materialized in her vision. DATA STREAM INITIATED. SOURCE: /CHIMERA/CORE/PRIME. EXTRACTION: 17%.
She stood perfectly still in the humming dark. This was the vulnerable moment. The only moment. Her mind did not wander. It maintained a quiet, panoramic awareness. The texture of the cool air on the exposed skin of her face. The precise pressure of the earpiece. The steady crawl of the percentage.
EXTRACTION: 89%.
A new sound. Not from the servers. From the stairwell door, two rooms over. A metallic scrape. Then a click.
Human. Off-schedule.
Her hand moved. The data cable retracted silently into her wrist port with a soft snick. The progress bar vanished. EXTRACTION COMPLETE. 100%. DATA PACKET SECURED.
She melted back into the shadow between two server racks, becoming just another vertical line in the grid of darkness. The nexus door opened. A beam of light from a powerful torch cut through the gloom, sweeping over the racks. The guard—a different one, younger, his face ruddy from the cold outside—muttered something in Icelandic. He was bored. Checking a box. His light passed over the space where she had stood, illuminated the server she'd tapped. It looked untouched. Innocent.
He lingered for a half-minute, yawned, and left. The door sighed shut.
Nyx waited. Counted sixty heartbeats. Slow. Regular.
Then she moved. Exit was the inverse of entry. Up the stairs. Down the hall. A different, pre-planned route to avoid the returning patrol. Out the same service door, which sealed behind her with a final, soft hiss.
The wind slapped her, a shocking return to the world of sensation. She crossed the road, climbed the gantry. In the lee of the fish-packing plant's wall, she allowed herself one action that was not strictly procedure.
She looked down at her gloved hand. She flexed the fingers. Inside that hand, in the encrypted storage of her suit, was a thing called Project Chimera. She knew nothing of its contents. Its nature was irrelevant. It was the package. The objective.
A void where curiosity might have been. A perfect, silent completion.
But as she turned to make her way back to the extraction point, a single, unbidden thought formed, clear and small like a pebble in a stream.
Lyra's glasses are still broken.